Anthony Liguori wrote:
Karsten M. Self wrote:
That's actually getting to be a preferred method here, at least for
some folks.
qemu file-backed installs allow you to use an existing RHEL
installer, without much fuss or mess, the tricky bit is finding the
filesystem afterward, as what qemu produces is a _partitioned_ file
with filesystems within it.
Or you can just expose as a device with a partition table. IMHO, this
is the best approach.
I've even had success resizing the disk image, and then (using a boot
disk), appropriately resizing the filesystem.
dd skip=63 bs=512 if=qemu.img of=xen.img
Keep in mind, I've not tried this myself :-)
Doh! I missed your skip. That should work for a partitioned file with
a single partition. If you've got multiple partitions, you'd want to
add the size in blocks as 'count', otherwise you're going to have
multiple partitions in what you're assuming is a single filesystem
image. Somewhere down the road, something's probably going to get
confused, unhappy, or both, about that. Or you're just going to carry
around a lot of slack space.
Are you doing this with the qemu partitioned file itself?
Yup.
My xend config line looks like this:
disk = [ 'file:/root/FC4.img,hda,w' ]
root = "/dev/hda1"
That just works. There shouldn't be any disadvantage to using this
method (other than it makes resizing individual partitions a bit more
difficult).
... that's on a filesystem image, not a partitioned file, though, right?
volumes, though it's possible to do so, complicating matters
somewhat more.
The first partition is /boot, the second is /. I didn't use logical
If you want to extract the filesystems, I'd recommend using lomount as
Ian suggests (and then just tar up the partitions).
Sure. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks...[1]
5. Loopback mount the qemu images, creating a couple of mountpoints.
Using the file I'm referencing above (rhel4):
mkdir mp1 mp2
su -c 'mount -o loop,offset=$(( 63 * 512 )) -t ext3 rhel4 mp1'
su -c 'mount -o loop,offset=$(( 4192964 * 512 )) -t ext3 rhel4
mp2'
As a final step, you could copy the contents of these two mountpoints
into a partition or a single filesystem image (a file with just a
filesystem in it, no partitions) which can be used for a Xen file-backed
DomU, etc.
There's a few things you'll want to do once you do the QEMU install.
Namely, you'll want to make sure to install the appropriate modules
(and run depmod).
Which modules?
I'm running RHEL4 and after /etc/fstab, relocating boot and modifying
/etc/fstab, commenting out the MAC address, it seems happy.
Otherwise, it just works.
The next logical step is to run QEMU within a domU and automate the
whole process.
Actually, a decent RH bootstrap would be useful. Dittos the ability to
install into an arbitrary target, *without* requiring a valid bootable
partition.
See RH Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=150206
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=150946
QEMU is a pretty amazing little piece of software :-)
Innit just? Spread the word, brother ;-)
Cheers.
--------------------
Notes:
1. ObGaryColeman, showing my age. Wait! I tuned in, but I didn't watch...
--
Karsten M. Self <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
XenSource, Inc.
2300 Geng Road #250 +1 650.798.5900 x259
Palo Alto, CA 94303 +1 650.493.1579 fax
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
|
Home