Re: [Xen-devel] Deficiencies in guest bootloader design

["Michael Paesold" <mpaesold@xxxxxx>]

Ewan Mellor wrote:

> > Is there anyone working on bootloader improvements? If not, is a change 
> > to
> > move the bootloader stuff from xm to Xend acceptable? In that case I 
> > could
> > try to come up with a patch.
> Certainly such a patch would be accepted.
I already read Anthony's reply -- so I see some obstacles now :-)

> There was a long thread discussing
> bootloaders recently -- you should dig it out of the archive and see what 
> the
> conclusions were -- there seem to be a few competing ideas for bootloader
> support in Xen (pygrub and domUloader being the two prominent ones).  If 
> you
> were going to put some effort into this, it would be appreciated by a 
> number
> of the Xen users, certainly.
I am going to do that now.

> > There are some issues though. In XendDomainInfo.initDomain, image.create 
> > is
> > done before self.createDevices. Can this be changed easily?
> Off the top of my head, I can't think why this would be too much of a 
> problem.
> Why do you ask though?  If the bootloader is running inside the guest, 
> then
> that is happening after both of those things, because at the point at 
> which we
> are doing initDomain, the guest hasn't even started running yet.  Why does
> ordering here concern you?
Well, with pygrub at least, the bootloader is not really executed in the 
guest, but in dom0. It extracts kernel and initrd into temporary files which 
are than booted as if they were directly specified in the guest config. So 
to extract the kernel, we would have to first setup the vbds.
I am going to check the archives now.

Best Regards,
Michael Paesold 

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