[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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