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Re: [Xen-users] xen in in the stock linux kernel...



On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Mark Williamson wrote:

The XenLinux in the XenSource repositority is currently a separate codebase
from the mainline Linux Xen support (although code flows between the two) and
it does have support for x86_64, which I assume you've tried?

no. I just ran into a situation where I needed a modern linux kernel so I could get a more current CIFS implimentation... moving the cifs directory between linux versions does not work :( This didn't start as a XEN study, so I haven't poked deeply at the XEN options... if I was that much of a keener I probably wouldn't still be running close to a dozen 3.0.x xen hosts... :) :(

I poked around on the wiki and in google, but I can't find
anything about getting a stock linux kernel to run... It seems
you want to copy the vmlinux file out of the top of the kernel
source tree, strip it, and gzip it ... that APPEARS to get the
right format of file that the xen tools will try to load... but
at that point I'm hosed... with the xen_guest message.

Yeah.  It's not possible to boot bzImage kernels directly under Xen at all;
that requires an update of the bzImage format, which has to be made without
breaking buggy bootloaders - so that part of the effort is going slow.

The vmlinux from the source tree should load on its own; stripping it and
gzipping it to get a small vmlinuz helps keep the size down a lot though!

At this point I don't care much, if vmlinux is good enough, that should be fine. I couldn't find _any_ docs on this process ... I was just trying to match what the domU and dom0 kernels looked like.

What Xen were you running this on?  I've had a mainline kernel boot
successfully on the Xen 3.0.3 shipped with CentOS / RHEL 5.  Are you sure
that paravirt_ops support *and* the specific Xen support were both compiled
into the kernel?

AFAIK, You can't get xen support without the paravirt options... and I did look at the system-map for my kernel, and it was full of xen symbols, it just didn't have __xen_guest in it ... Hhmm, a quick grep of the the linux.2.6.23.1 tree only shows xen_guest in include/xen/interface/elfnote.h ... and event that is only in the comments...

from xm info...

xen_major              : 3
xen_minor              : 0
xen_extra              : .2-2
xen_caps               : xen-3.0-x86_32

That's just what's on the i386 box... From where I sit, it looks like my issues are a consequence of not keeping up to date.

can you tell me more about "32-bit PAE compatibility mode on an x64 Xen host"? I'd never heard of that. I've also trying to get hvm working on one of the x86_64 machines ... I had a corrupted rpm database that slowed things down a bit, and since my overall goal is win2003 <-> Linux file access I've spent a fair bit of the day on other topics.

The 3.0.2 i386 box is at a state where I have both remote power and remote serial console control... (just tested)... it's a drbd secondary so I don't really want to trash it, but rebooting it isn't a big deal as long as I'm darn sure it's going to come back.

THANKS for the info, you've given me more than a few things to look into.

-Tom


Cheers,
Mrak

Gotta like it when people typo their own names :)

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