Re: [Xen-users] Quest for a better FAQ

[Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@xxxxxx>]

Dylan Martin wrote:
> I'm working on making a better xen faq.  Hopefully I can use it to
> replace the one we now have on the wiki.  

Please, don't start a new one, but improve the one that is there!

> 
> I'd love to know what people think really are the most frequently
> asked questions?  

Hard to say ad-hoc. I think your start looking at the archives is a good
one.

Add these you think which are not covered in the FAQ, and remove these
which are not up to date anymore. (Answers which are still valid but
don't seem frequently asked anymore should stay - they might just not be
frequently asked on the list because they are on the FAQ and some people
read it.

Apart from that, a lot problems I see occuring and reoccuring with Xen,
and coming as questions to the list are either:

- very strange behaviour of Xen under very special circumstances, like
specific (broken) hardware, and very specific setups, together with
quite esoteric and hard to debug errors occuring.
There are so many versions of Xen out there, and every distribution has
their own specific set of patches to Xen and the Xen Linux Kernel(and
thesde all are combined with gazillions of different hardware setups),
that it's hard to catch all these problems.

- bad error reporting and logging. This is not a documentation problem.
I did not run into these problems for a while because I have my fixed
setup, but there was times when I found it really bad how errors are
reported in Xen:
  - very first, the logfile where you _might_ find some useful
information in ist the one with "debug" in it's name - which is opposite
to usual behaviour. Normally, in debug i'd expect strange stuff only
developers understand, and in the normal log, stuff useful for users is
saved. Xen is the other way around.
  - bad error checking and reporting in the userspace tools. Like, for
example, if you don't set qemu_dm right in the config file, instead of
getting a decent warning, one just gets a Qemu screen which stays blank.
There was some other common misconfiguration that occured sometimes, and
resulted in a totally esoteric error message - I forgot it sadly. There
might be more of them.

- people who don't read the FAQ, user manual(admittedly outdated and
missing a lot of important things, still gives a very good overview of
what xen is about), and fail to search mailing lists. Sadly, you won't
catch these with a FAQ, and my attempts to set up a list netiquette
where not recognized by XenSource. even if one employee of them told me
he wanted to get the netiquette onto the List subscription page.


my 2 cents.
Henning


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