Hi all,
I'm coming from a lxc background and recently found a real need for a full virtualised windows solution. In the past I have stuck it out with Linux, but Wine just hasn't been performing and I've had nothing but problems. Anyways I tried a few things, and just could not get XEN to work for the life of me. I got KVM working but VGA passthrough was a pain, I could never get it to accept a device, even after I blacklisted it. Eventually I got around to XEN as it is supposed to do this better, however I could not get past the first stage ... a simple minimal virtual machine. No matter what I did, no matter which distro (Debian 6,7 and Ubuntu 12.10) my Host (dom0) would either reboot or lockup. I tried looking for errors in messages, kernel, xen/* but nothing really stood out.
So my question would be what am I missing? What logs should I be looking at?
I managed to fix the small bugs which popped up like files being in wrong places etc. Lastly I ran this using xm create <config> and after that it would just hang. Machine would become unresponsive, or reboot.
Also I did look around if anyone was having these problems, and found a few threads with the exact same issue, but no answers so far.
I would really appreciate some help to just be able to start the machine with nothing fancy then I could possibly take it from there.
Also if anyone has any good links to guides for successful setups compiling from source, preferably on Debian installation. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Linux dummy, just would be nice to have something that proven to work before I start stabbing around.
I've been working on this on and off for about a week, and quite frankly feel extremely defeated by it =_=
To help you understand what I may have done wrong I will attach some information below:
System:
Motherboard: GA-970A-D3 (rev 1.3, BIOS F10)
CPU: AMD FX 8300 @ 3.3GHz
GPU: Powercolor ATI Radeon 5970
RAM: 16GB Corsair CML16GX3M2A1600C10B @ 1333
Setups tried:
All were done with a Windows 7 x86_64 guest VM
Debian 6: Standard bridge. Installed xen-linux-system, in-fact I followed the official guide
http://wiki.debian.org/Xen and quite a few others.
Debian 7: same as above, found more guides etc
Above 2 would crash and just become plain unresponsive
Ubuntu 12.10: Similar, instead followed ubuntu related guides
This one would reboot the dom0
Things I tried or did do before you ask them:
- Yes I booted into the XEN kernel (Linux x.y.z with XEN 4.0.x)
- Enabled IOMMU via kernel options as per XEN wiki documents (referenced these a lot).
- Made sure that svm was enabled during kernel boot (xm dmsg)
- Made sure that IOMMU was enabled during kernel boot (xm dmsg), however this behaved a bit wierd, so i didnt use pci pass through right off the bat. Well again I couldnt even start the vm so no point.
Things I didn't try:
- Compile XEN kernel and dom0 kernel from source
My HVM config:
(Though I technically tried a few different combinations from different guide, including some very minimal ones)
name = 'xenvm1'
kernel = '/usr/lib/xen-4.0/boot/hvmloader'
builder = 'hvm'
memory = '34096'
shadow_memory = '8'
device_model='/usr/lib/xen-4.0/bin/qemu-dm'
disk = [ 'phy:RAID10_LVM/Windows_7_Ultimate.x86_64,hda,w' ]
vif = ['bridge=br0, mac=01:23:de:ad:be:ef']
boot='dc'
vnc=1
vncviewer=0
sdl=0
vcpus=4
usbdevice='tablet'
Best Regards,
Almir kadric
