Re: [Xen-users] Building Xen: failure to launch

[Andreas Sommer <AndiDog@xxxxxx>]

Richard Bowser wrote:

Hi everyone.  I'm a Xen newbie and I'm trying to get oriented here in the xeniverse.  (Can I say that here?)  My eventual goal is to set up multiple virtual xen servers in a minimum number of physical "boxes".  My only knowledge of Xen so far is my careful reading of the famous paper "Xen - the Art of Virtualization".  So I went to the web and searched Xen out.  I discovered that Xen 3.4.0 is out, so I downloaded it.  The 3.4.0 download page had three tarballs available.  One was "Xen 3.4.0 (hypervisor and tools) official source distribution" and another was "Linux 2.6.18 with Xen 3.4.0 support source tarball".  I chose the third one: "Xen 3.4.0 plus kernel combined source distribution tarball".  This seems good.

If you're still a newbie, just install Xen via aptitude or whatever your package manager is. The package is called something like "xen-linux-system". The stable version of the package will install Xen 3.2.1.
Anyway, given the case you really want a newer Xen version, it's *usually* (tested on Debian) enough to do:

hg clone http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.4-testing.hg xen-3.4-testing
cd xen-3.4-testing
make install

I have two linux environments available to me.  My personal development system runs Ubuntu 9.04.  I also have a Fedora Core 10 system available through school, where I'm working on a PhD.  As of this moment, I have fresh, new xen-3.4.0 directories on both systems.  I have them positioned under /boot on both systems.  Thus I have both a /boot/grub and a /boot/xen-3.4.0 directory in place.  So far I've only successfully built the documentation - which has been a most informative exercise.  Under Fedora 10, I generated the documents almost without effort.  Under Ubuntu I've been given a short course in roadblocks:  It seems Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is latex-challenged as distributed and I needed to get and install tetex and graphviz systems.  When I did that, I was able to build the documents with a "make -C docs".

However. my main build "make world" under Ubuntu has become a logical demolition derby. The first surprise was the error message "Makefile:21: === libgcrypt not installed: falling back to libcrypto ==="  This was very interesting because my Synaptic package manager tells me libgcrypt11 IS installed.  Re-installing it had no effect on this error message.  Also I was confused by the reference "Makefile:21:"  Line 20 of Makefile is ".PHONY: build"  Line 21 of my Makefile just says "build: kernels"  (Does anyone know what's going on here?)

You might have libgcrypt installed, but not libgcrypt-dev (which includes headers needed for compiling) ??!

At this point, the build process enters a long, slow build process evidently retrieving the linux kernels and spooling partial results to `/home/rich/.ketchup/linux-2.6.18.tar.bz2.partial'  That eventually reaches 100% and completes. 

The following messages show up:
--2009-06-27 20:50:00--  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.18.tar.gz
Resolving www.kernel.org... 149.20.20.133, 204.152.191.37
Connecting to www.kernel.org|149.20.20.133|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 52467340 (50M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `/home/rich/.ketchup/linux-2.6.18.tar.gz.partial'

It starts spooling and then eventually completes.  But NOW things get cryptic:
--2009-06-27 20:54:53--  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.18.tar.gz.sign
Resolving www.kernel.org... 149.20.20.133, 204.152.191.37
Connecting to www.kernel.org|149.20.20.133|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 248 [application/pgp-signature]
Saving to: `/home/rich/.ketchup/linux-2.6.18.tar.gz.sign.partial'

     0K                                                       100% 25.7M=0s

2009-06-27 20:54:53 (25.7 MB/s) - `/home/rich/.ketchup/linux-2.6.18.tar.gz.sign.partial' saved [248/248]

gpg: Signature made Tue 19 Sep 2006 09:56:08 PM MDT using DSA key ID 517D0F0E
gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
ketchup: gpg returned 512

Ketchup seems to check if the kernel has a valid signature. I think I had that problem before. You could look where the ketchup command appears in the makefile and add some parameters to disable signature checking.

ketchup: removing files...
ketchup: Tarball download failed
make[3]: *** [linux-2.6.18/.valid-src] Error 255
make[2]: *** [linux-2.6-xen-intree-install] Error 2
make[1]: *** [install-kernels] Error 1
make: *** [world] Error 2

I'm completely at a loss here.  It seems xen was trying to download and generate the linux kernels - but then something failed, somewhere.  I don't know who thought what didn't work or why.  Error 255?  Error 2?  Error 1?  Can anyone here help me make sense of this?  Any insight would be MOST welcome!  It was interesting in that these problems cleared my previously generated documentation.  I'm guessing the build scripts ran a "make clean" - which cleared my generated documents BEFORE the downloading failure aborted the build process.  That means that whatever went down failed before my Makefile reached its own "make -C docs".  I'd sure like to know what happened!

-Rich B.

I would really recommend you the simpler installation methods I mentioned above. The documentation should be build automatically if you have the necessary latex/tetex packages. But note that I always tested on Debian lenny.

Best regards
    Andreas

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