Re: [Xen-devel] Easier interface for kickstarting Xen VMs

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> When you're embedding an HTTPD server into your Xen configuration
> file, you know there's something wrong. :-)
> 
> I was curious to know if there would be any interest in offering
> a more polished, easier to use interface for kickstarting Xen
> VMs.  No mucking around with ks= and trusted web servers: just
> say where your kickstart file is and Xen will take care of the rest.
> Maybe even let you do a little preprocessing the same way you
> can use Python scripting to support multiple machines out of one
> configuration file.
> 
> We have a few ways of how we might do this: the "temporarily spawn
> an HTTP server" is one of them but other possibilities include
> mounting multiple initrds (doesn't actually work with Anaconda, we're
> looking into it) and exporting a small, temporary filesystem to the VM.
> If there's interest, we'll clean up our code and submit it.
> 

You should be aware that we are trying to move away from xend to xl,
that generally supports the same VM config file format with just one
exception: embedded python.

Considering that kickstarting Xen VMs is a common problem and probably
the main headache for sysadmins when moving from xend to xl, I would
welcome a clean and small solution to this problem that doesn't involve
embedded python.
If we go with the temporary fs strategy, I guess there isn't any actual
code to be committed to xen-unstable, but rather a wiki page to
describe the solution and a link to the initrd? 

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel