Re: [Xen-users] Xen on RHEL 5.1 to para-virt Ubuntu Gusty

[Evan Lavelle <sa212+xen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Williamson wrote:

> > Sound nice because I already have a full virtualized Ubuntu on RHEL at the
> > moment. How did you switch to paravirt? Do you just install the Ubuntu Xen
> > kernel and reboot?
> Almost that, yeah.
> ...
> I've occasionally pondered modifying the Xen tools to make it possible (and 
> easy) to "dual boot" between PV and HVM modes.  Do you think this would be 
> useful?
*very* useful; I've had no end of trouble booting the same image in both 
PV and HVM modes, and I've given up. a manual change is hard enough - on 
F8, after using virt-install, I have to change fstab, mess with SELinux, 
modprobe.conf, inittab, and so on, get a new initrd, label (and 
enable?!) the swap partition, and so on. Even after that lot I don't 
think a virt-install-created PV image will boot up as HVM. I can't 
understand why this lot should be necessary. You end up with a 
non-standard distribution which is difficult to understand or maintain 
(and apps running in the DomU would have to *really* dumb if they can't 
figure out that they're running virtualised).
From the user perspective, this would be a great thing to have. It 
would be nice to start with a stock install (perhaps one you dual-booted 
from previously), boot it as an HVM DomU, and then gradually 
paravirtualise it if/when necessary, changing back if you get it wrong. 
Ideally, all the necessary changes should be hidden in the kernel, where 
the user can't see them. I think this would probably take out 90% of the 
complexity of using Xen for new users, for what should be a fairly 
modest effort.
Evan

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