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

[Dave Hill <davehill@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2020-07-26 10:55 p.m., Bernd Bausch wrote:
> 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
Glad to hear you figured it out.

I did some editing of the Beginners Guide a few years ago. I'd be 
grateful to hear about any other difficulties you ran into getting it 
running or places where the text could be clearer.
David