Re: Newbie fails booting: "Xen is relinquishing VGA console"

[Bernd Bausch <berndbausch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I solved that problem. It was, of course, entirely due to operator 
error. The short story is that I use a spare laptop with a dead display 
to which I connect an HDMI monitor. However, in the UEFI and BIOS 
parameters the laptop's built-in display was configured as the "boot 
display" device.
There might have been other factors, since that problem didn't manifest 
itself when booting non-Xen'ed Debian, but I won't investigate that and 
am happy now after switching to BIOS and selecting HDMI as the boot display.
All other suggestions that Pierre-Philipp made are, for the moment, a 
bit over my head, but I have an environment now that enables me to learn.
Thanks!

On 7/26/2020 4:39 PM, Pierre-Philipp Braun wrote:

> > Trying to boot the Xen kernel, all I get is a dark screen. When I 
> > remove the "quiet" option from Grub's menu point, I see that the last 
> > message before blanking the screen is "Xen is relinquishing VGA 
> > console".
> Is this EFI or legacy BIOS/CSM?  I will assume legacy, much easier.
>
> Do you see the XEN booting but not the Linux kernel nor the system?  
> You don't get a system prompt either?
> Maybe you just need to force output on VGA, in case it goes to serial 
> port.
> xen.gz argument would be console=vga but you probably don't need that
> kernel argument try add console=tty0
> but then you should have a prompt showing up anyways, unless systemD 
> service mgetty now finds out by itself where to spit? (cray things 
> happen nowadays)
> At this stage I think you need to play with booting, then will come 
> XEN and domU guest tuning.  I suggest you try PV and then switch to 
> PVH with builder = "pvh".  By the way you can even run the dom0 as PVH 
> (as it is a privileged guest) but you absolutely need to define 
> `dom0_mem` for that.
> /boot/xen.gz dom0=pvh dom0_mem=1024M,max:8192M loglvl=info noreboot=true