Re: [Xen-users] Howto install domU CentOS 5 directly on partition

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

kanour-xen wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I am new to CentOS (Debian user) and I am looking for way how to 
> install CentOS 5 on domU in the way that I have it directly on dom0 
> LVM partition.
> If I install it with virtual-manager then the installation program 
> takes that partition as a disk and then creates new partitions on it. 
> I don't want it that way because I cannot then mount it from dom0.
Yes, you can. I agree that virt-install and virt-manager make some 
really bad default assumptions, and prefer the latest versions. But 
there are two underlying issues:
1: You can access the internal partitions from Dom0. Avoid the use of 
LVM in the DomU (which is a pointless thing to do in the first place 
there!), and use "kpartx -a -v /dev/Vol[whatver]/[Xen-image-partition]". 
Then mount the partitions from /dev/mapper/[Xen-image-partiion]1, etc.
2: The virt-install and virt-manager have the use of pygrub hard-coded 
into them, but *hardcoded*. This has advantages, but means you need grub 
to manage kernels in your DomU. And grub cannot deal with hard drive 
partitions like /dev/xdva1 that does not have a drive named /dev/xdva to 
go with it. Sad, but true, and an issue with grub itself for Xen 
implementations.
> Is there some way how to install it directly on partition as for 
> example in Debian with debootstrap?
There are plenty of OS image building tools, such as "mock" and those 
images at www.jailtime.org. You can save a good OS image as a tarball 
and build from that, if you like, but you'll have to work out the pygrub 
fun if you use that.
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