Re: Xen 4.11 on MacPro (early2008) NOT booting, blank screen. Dom0 alone boots OK; Debian buster, LVM on Raid1, efi

[eugen@xxxxxx]

Finally, I found a solution to my problem:

> It's a fresh installation, using debian installer, then installing
> the xen-system packages. See hardware and versions details later below.
> 
> Booting the Debian system, the dom0 alone, works great.
> Booting with Xen Hypervisor stops at a blank screen, as described below:
> All the Grub2 commands seems to be executed ok: the echo messages are
> displayed, I can see them fine (like 'Loading initial ramdisk ...',
> including a last echo debug message I put there myself. Immediately after
> that, the screen goes blank and stays blank forever. My Samsung TV
> (hdmi) doesn't complain about signal lost or something.
> 
> There are no log messages in /var/log or any indication that domO under
> Xen was loading/starting. Also no network presence (like ping, ssh).

All I had to do for it to work was to disable the UEFI Runtime Services, by
providing this Xen command line option:

efi=no-rs

Some details about Xen and Runtime Services, I found here:
https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_EFI#Compatibility_of_UEFI_Host_Firmware.2C_Xen_and_UEFI_Runtime_Services


> 
> Hardware:
> MacPro (early 2008: Macpro3,1)
> 2x Intel Xeon 4562
> ATI Radeon HD 2600 (2xDVI ports) with firmware from
> firmware-amd-graphics package
> connected to a Samsung TV (dvi-hdmi cable)
> 
> Software:
> Debian buster (10.4) amd64 - using debian-installer
> LVM on RAID1
> Using EFI 64 bits
> Grub 2.02
> Linux kernel 4.19.0-9-amd64
> Xen-system 4.11.3
 
Regards,
   Eugen