Re: [Xen-users] Dom0 Selection, Options

["Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-04-12 09:07, Ray wrote:
> I would like to build Xen workstation on a new Toshiba laptop.  I would
> like it to efficiently run the latest Debian and Windows, at least.
Unless you've got a workstation laptop, or a high-end gaming one (a real 
gaming laptop like an ASUS ROG system, not one that just claims amazing 
graphics), you are likely to get pretty poor performance from Windows 
(at least, if you're using Windows 7, I have no experience with 8, 8.1 
or 10 running under Xen, but I doubt that they'll do much better).
> I have installed Jessie and Xen.  I am finding that my Jessie
> installation may not be a simple as it should be - I loaded a variety of
> items as I have been learning along the way.  I have reloaded all the OS
> more than a dozen times trying to get a complete functional system.  Now
> I wonder if 'complete' is appropriate in consideration that dom0 should
> be simple.  My concern that if there is a function that dom0 did not
> support, the VMs may not be able to support it either.  But this no
> longer sounds correct.  I chose Jessie because I wanted to use Debian
> for my 'important' VMs.
Debian is not a bad choice, as long as you stick to the base system and 
do an install without GNOME, KDE, or any other desktop environment.
> I am ready to reinstall everything (a few more times) to get to a
> simple, functioning system that I can run and domu efficiently.  I see
> that Debian only support up to Xen 4.4 which does not support UEFI.
For what it's worth, building Xen from source is not difficult, the 
build tools themselves do most of the hard work of figuring out where 
everything they need is on the system.
> I would like to hear what are some other choices that may get back to
> the initial simple dom0 requirement, what are some of the choices for
> distributions to use for dom0 and what constitutes minimal and still
> support fully functional VMs?
My personal recommendation would be either a clean install of NetBSD 
(which will fit in less than 4G including space for log files and all 
the packages required by Xen, assuming you don't pull in a GUI), or if 
you absolutely want Linux, a baseline install of Gentoo fine-tuned to 
your particular hardware.  Most any distribution will work though, as 
long as you don't pull in a full desktop environment (which in turn 
pulls in multiple gigabytes of other packages on almost everything 
except Gentoo) during the initial install.  Get the system working 
reliably without a GUI, then worry about the GUI.
> One of my fundamental challenges is this new laptop has a 4k display.
> When it boots with no display configuration, the text is too small to
> read.  I added a lot of complexity to try and get readable text in both
> the boot process, console and GUI.
Avoid running a GUI in Domain-0, it will hurt your VM performance, may 
negatively impact system stability, and becomes another variable when 
debugging the system.  If you absolutely have to, don't use GNOME or 
KDE, they both eat up huge amounts of resources (I use XFCE myself on 
the rare occasion I need a GUI in Domain-0, but LXDE or even something 
like FVWM will work well without hurting performance much).
As far as the 4k display issues, there are ways in Linux at least that 
you can make the kernel think it's a lower resolution display than it 
really is, which will in turn make the text bigger (because the kernel 
will not run the GPU output above what the display can handle).  I'm not 
certain there's much that can be done for the boot process though...
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