Re: [Xen-users] Can't get XEN to work at all on Debian 6, 7 and Ubuntu 12.10

[Casey DeLorme <cdelorme@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Almir,

I don't have much to offer by way of suggestions for packaged Xen and the xm toolstack, but I wrote a (slightly dated) guide for Debian Wheezy building Xen from source, which should hold mostly accurate for Xen 4.2 stable with minor changes. ÂPrimary benefit is it is comprehensive, starts with installing Debian and works all the way to running a Windows 7 HVM (DomU), complete with videos.

Following that guides instructions minus the EFI Source Modification (which has been patched and only applies) and using Xen 4.2.1 stable (revision 25950 I believe) should take approx. 2~ hours to complete, substantially longer to understand all the details.

I intend to update the guide when Debian Wheezy releases as stable. ÂIn March last year I was in your shoes, just getting my feet wet with Xen and after a month of failed package tests I went with building from source. ÂIf it makes you feel any better about your week, it took me half a year to get things sorted out.

Hope this helps,

~Casey

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Andreas Falck <falck.andreas.lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Almir,

Sorry, I have no good advice on which logs to watch. It is possible that if the dom0 kernel ever gets time to ouput something, it will do it to the console.

One piece of information that might be useful for further debugging is whether the error occurs when the VM kernel boots or already when the HVM bios boots. You can try this by starting a HVM vm without any virtual disk, thus booting only the HVM bios. Also, it would probably be of interest to know if a PV guest works (you can probably do this easily by starting only a PV kernel, no need to install a full PV system). However, I am not sure on what to do with that information, but someone else might have a clue.

Regards,
Andreas

2013/3/18 Almir Kadric <almir@xxxxxxxxxx>

Hi, Andreas,

Thanks for your quick response ^_^

Sounds like you have been testing extensively. If I get you right, dom0 freezes or reboots when you try to start the VM, but works otherwise?

To say the least yes I have, a lot of sleep lost over this. Âorz

If I get you right, dom0 freezes or reboots when you try to start the VM, but works otherwise?

That's correct, dom0 works perfectly fine, right up until I start a domU. Regardless of what's in that domU.

I assume you have tried with IOMMU disabled in bios too?

Hmmm I can't quite remember, it's quite a blur after a week of sleepless nights. I'll give it another whirl and see what happens.

Also, I assume thatÂ

memory = '34096'

Yes sorry typo, I pulled that up quickly from a site I borrowed that config from, was changing it to "4096"

Any recommendations for logging to watch? Generally I tail -f a log on my screen and then ssh in to execute xm create. But the logs just die, hoping to find that right one which just shows the error before a freeze.

Best Regards,

Almir kadric

Website: www.almirkadric.com

Mobile:ÂÂÂÂ +81 90 8008 1578

Office:ÂÂÂÂÂ +81 03 4550 1448

Email: almir@xxxxxxxxxx

On Mar 18, 2013, at 5:59 PM, Andreas Falck wrote:

Hi,

Sounds like you have been testing extensively. If I get you right, dom0 freezes or reboots when you try to start the VM, but works otherwise?

I assume you have tried with IOMMU disabled in bios too? In case of a buggy bios, turning IOMMU off could possibly make a difference (in order to find the problem, I realize that you plan to use IOMMU).

Also, I assume that

memory = '34096'

Is a typo? Since you say that you have tried different vm configs.

Regards,
Andreas


2013/3/18 Almir Kadric <almir@xxxxxxxxxx>

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.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2011/12/msg01779.html

http://xen.markmail.org/search/?q=GA-970A#query:GA-970A+page:1+mid:fwgjnzmfy4pylgiu+state:results

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 CorsairÂCML16GX3M2A1600C10B @ 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 guideÂhttp://wiki.debian.org/XenÂandÂquite 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

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