[Xen-users] Semi-Noob looking for some general answers

["Gary W. Smith" <gary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I’ve been using Xen for some months now under the rPath distro.  Xen to this point has been stable and simple to use.  That being said, I’ve been trying new things (since last week) and have run into one road block after another.  Most of these road blocks seem to be issues with distro’s and not Xen.

Using rPath the DomU is built to include a Xen guest kernel inside of it.  Using a non-xen enabled DomU is a simple matter of mounting the image, chrooting and then upgrading using their tools to xen enabled kernel.  This has worked great for me.

So I have decided to start working with other distro’s.  I started with the pre made ones over at jailtime.  Trying to use those distro’s I found that they didn’t work unless I had a DomU kernel inside of the Dom0 (hey, it’s still a learning experience).  So I copied the rPath DomU kernel + lib’s from the image to a directory on the Dom0 and pointed the gentoo config there and sure enough it booted.  But inside of the DomU I don’t have any of the lib’s for the kernel (such as iptables, etc). My next try was to include the /lib directory from the rPath DomU into the gentoo image and it booted just fine (using the bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub').  Everything appeared to work fine but I started slowing noticing odd things happen (including kernel panics). 

Somewhat similar scenario of CentOS4 and Fedora6.  Each had their own problems.

Under Fedora6 (using kernel=/path/to/working/DomU/kernel) I tried running the yum install kernel-xen but this didn’t work.

This lead me to look around for real kernel upgrade for each of the guest Distro’s I wanted to use.  But I haven’t found any except of CentOS4 (which is 4.4-testing).

My first thoughts were: Is there a better approach to this?  Is there a simpler approach to this?

My opinion is that some of these Distro’s seem to be lagging behind for DomU support in general.  I’d like to use each one of the Distro’s with their kernel’s any not some kernel from another Distro who may have done things much differently.

Am I missing a bigger picture somewhere?  I don’t might setting up an environment for each distro and compiling a new kernel for each one based upon their existing (I’ve re-compiled RHEL4 several times last year).  I figure that would be the ideal way but I don’t want to do redundant work if it’s already done or in the pipe somewhere.

Gary Wayne Smith

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