[Xen-users] Creating initial file system for a new Xen domain

["David Stone" <unclestoner@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've moderately familiar with using XenSource distributions and also
administering Xen with tools like virt-manager on Fedora.  However now
I'm building xen (3.0.3) from source and trying to use what I built
myself.

My first question is why is it that tools like virt-manager don't work
when I boot to the Xen hypervisor and Dom0 I built?  The virt-manager
I'm trying to use is from FC6.  Is this known to be generally
impossible for some reason (missing APIs), or is it supposed to work
at least sometimes?  What are my other options for tools that will
create a Xen domain configuration file...I know this can be done by
hand but there must be more friendly tools out there somewhere...

My second question is very basic, forgive me: using just the tools
that are built with the xen source distribution, how does one install
Linux on a DomU?  I know you just point to a kernel/ramdisk in the
domain configuration file, but what about the root filesystem?  Using
XenExpress and virt-manager, I always run through a Linux install, so
that populates the root filesystem with all the stuff essential for
the system.  I know that you can point a domain to a partition in the
domain's configuration file, but how do you populate that partition?

My third and final question is: when using virt-install a file-backed
VBD is created for the DomU.  The domain's configuration file has:
disk = [ 'tap:aio:/vmdisks/Fedora6Guest3,xvda,w', ]
I'd like to mount this in Dom0.  I execute
xm block-attach 0 tap:aio:/vmdisks/Fedora6Guest3 /dev/xvda1 w 0
which seems to work.  But how do mount the device /dev/xvda1 in Dom0?
I think the problem is that it isn't really an ext3 filesystem,
because it contiains multiple partitions (one for /boot and one for
/), so I can't just say
mount -t ext3 /dev/xvda1 /tmp/mountpoint

Thanks!
Dave

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