[Xen-community] Xen 4.0.0 on Ubuntu 10.04

["Horton, Steve - IS" <Steve.Horton@xxxxxxx>]

Hello, I am a “first time caller” haha Even though I have avidly followed 
almost every thread for three months. (since I've been banging my head on my 
keyboard) It has been somewhat challenging to say the least. With that said, I 
would like to add that I would definitely not be as far along as I am with Xen 
if not for you guys in the Xen community!

I'm trying to compile xen from source and get it up and running on Ubuntu 10.04 
x86_64. In the end I pretty much want to be able to use pci pass-through to 
dictate everything to each VM  like: This nic/ram and CPU to this DomU etc. My 
main goal is to test/prove strong separation between DomU's from a security 
perspective. I think this is a great selling point for Xen and this testing 
would be beneficial to the community as a whole, however to prove it I need to 
get it running first.

Just for the record, I was able to download the pre-compiled 2.6.18 
kernel/initrd from young's repo and get Xen to boot using Fedora 12 or 
13(although I never could get X to start) however, as RH/Fedora seems to be 
wanting to push the Type-2 Linux KVM, and from the many comments made by the 
Red-Hat/FC gurus I've spoken with, they aren't giving Xen a fair shake IMHO. So 
I have dropped my Fedora efforts all together and decided to go with Ubuntu 
instead.

I am not sure if the Xen packages available via apt will meet my needs as from 
what I can tell I need to use the pv_ops kernel to get pci pass-through 
working. (By all means, please correct me if I'm ill informed, or just retarded)

Here is where I stand at this point.

I pretty much installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu, install all deps to compile 
Xen, download the xen-4.0.0 source 
(http://bits.xensource.com/oss-xen/release/4.0.0/xen-4.0.0.tar.gz) and have 
caught hell even getting a Dom0 to boot. I've read almost every post on the 
forum and can't seem to get everything working.

I do a:
make world HTTP_GIT=y (because git is blocked at our firewall)
and it goes and pulls down everything, (linux-2.6-pvops.git) I enter the 
xen-4.0.0/build-linux-2.6-pvops_x86_64 dir; make menuconfig; back out into 
xen-4.0.0; make; make install and the installer asks me the Xen specific 
questions and places the Dom0 kernel in /boot

kernel_ver=”The box is reinstalling as we speak so whatever the version was (I 
can't remember at the moment maybe 2.6.31.13??)”

Anyway after the kernel build /lib/modules does have a $kernel_ver dir so I use
depmod $kernel_ver; mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-$kernel_ver $kernel_ver
to build the initrd and place it in /boot as well.

Because 10.04 uses grub2 (yet another learning curve we won't go into!), I edit 
my /etc/grub.d/40_custom file and add the new entry with (mutiboot, module, 
module lines) and run update-grub2

It adds the entry into /boot/grub/grub.cfg and I reboot and boot off the new 
kernel.

I see Xen flags go by and the screen goes black. (I have an i915 video card BTW 
not the Nvidia card that is known to do this according to the forum)
That is pretty much all I get.

I have also tried to download the source for the Ubuntu kernel i'm running 
2.6.31.13, turned on all the xen stuff and compiled and installed the new 
kernel the Debian way and the box pretty much does the same thing. My 
partitions are Ext4 so I am in the process of starting over using Ext3 instead 
hoping that it just can't mount /dev/sda1.

I'm sorry this post is so long but after 3 months I am at a loss and am 
considering a new career as a truck-driver.

If you all would be so kind as to point me in the right direction or even AWAY 
from the WRONG direction i'd be forever grateful!
Thanks!
Steve

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