next chapter in domUbuntu was:Re: [Xen-users] Xen newbie question

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric S. Johansson wrote:

> when I come back from shoveling snow, I'll try making a cp level copy of 
> the partition onto a new straight file image.
long story short, I was unable to extract the ubuntu partition created 
using qemu and make a working domU.  There's something about me and 
partition math that just doesn't seem to work with file based 
partitioned disk images.

so in rereading the documentation I saw the trick of copying files from 
the dom0 image into a domU partition.  I did and it worked... mostly.  I 
believe that this technique or very close variant will work for any 
Linux distribution and let you get to a working domU image relatively 
quickly.  The majority of the time will be spent waiting for qemu to do 
its stuff.
the rough sequence is:

Build OS image in qemu
mount partition from qemu OS image (I used lomount which is now 
apparently included in xen 3.0)
cp -a qemu_partition file_image
cp -a domU_modules file_image
fix /etc/network/interfaces for your local network
edit /etc/modules for only the modules you need
edit inittab to remove... (haven't worked this part out quite right yet)
create your domU.xm
xm create domU.xm -c

(puzzlement number one: why is there a 20-30 second delay on 
initializing CPU #1.  I'm also only seeing one CPU.  Do I need to do 
something different with domU.  Will xen manage the CPU's for the domU's?
puzzlement number two: why do I get "couldn't get a file descriptor 
referring to the console" message?  Searching says it's something 
related to the console set up in inittab but I haven't puzzled it out yet)
You will probably get LVM and EVMS errors at this point.  Ignore them

Login using the account and password you created when installing via qemu.

turn off:
  LVM
  EVMS
  ntp
  ntpd
and maybe others.

Reboot the domU image and verify everything is operating correctly.

Now I haven't gone this far yet but this is my plan:

It seems to me that one could create new domU images by copying this 
baseline image into larger file or LVM based disks.  It also strikes me 
that one should be able to create a relatively large LVM disk, dd the 
baseline image into it and then it resize the filesystem to match the 
LVM disk.
They both have challenges and I'm going to play with both.  I know the 
simple copy will work so that may not be any advantage to the dd and 
resize except for satisfying one's alpha geek testosterone urges which I 
know none of us here suffer from.
If others could play with this model, I would greatly appreciate it.  I 
want to make sure it works and then put it up on the wiki.
I must say, this wouldn't be such a problem if we could "boot" a domU 
from CD-ROM.  ;-) I other hand, we only need to do this once in awhile 
and the qemu approach doesn't suck too badly as long as you are running 
on something faster than a Pentium III/500 megahertz laptop.
Thanks for the help folks and working out the bugs in this procedure 
would be a great contribution opportunity for the non-coding, reasonably 
sophisticated end-user.
---eric

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