On 1/12/07, Matthew Wolff <wolffm2002@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello, I am new to the world of Xen. I realize the
purpose of this mailing list is not for you all to
answer "newbie" questions, but the Xen website ranks
me as a second rate citizen (no forum for open source
or non-commercial beginners?).
A wiki can be found at wiki.xensource.com
Sure you can ask newbie questions here, supposed you tried your best
to find answers in available docs (wiki, manpages, manual, xm help,
google, this list's archive) first. It's sometimes good to tell us
that you tried that, so we don't tell you to RTFM first :)
Feel welcome to ask!
My first impression was that I needed a modified Host
OS to run as dom0 and then I could run umodified
versions of linux (kernal 2.6 according to the wiki)
as VMs. Then I read something that says that only
certain distros are supported as domU guests. And then
I read tonight that any linux version with kernal 2.6
can run as an unmodified guest OS. So my question is
this: if I have a ported host OS (say one of the four
from the Xen website)
As you write here OS and Linux Kernel as two different things: To run
a Xen Domain 0, you can use just about any Linux Distribution that is
capable to work with Kernel 2.6.x.
There aren't further modifications necessary but the OS Kernel who has
to be made to work with the Xen Hypervisor. For older versions, things
have to be done so the TLS libraries are working nicely together with
Xen, wich is solved for all new releases of mainstream distributions -
these also contain Xen packages already.
Besides that, there are some other OSes you can use as Domain 0 -
mainly NetBSD and OpenSolaris, FreeBSD is in development.
There is a modified Linux kernel included in the Xen Packages from
Xensource ( I can only talk about the stuff released as traballs,
never tried the rpm packages).
This kernel can be used
can I run ANY linux distro
(unmodifed) as a guest OS?
If not, do I need an Intel
VT/AMD-v (or whatever its called) enabled processor in
order to do so?
Also a bit complex:
1) To run anything unmodified, you need such a processor.
This is, again, not about having to modify anything in the system
itself, it's mostly about running an unmodified Kernel!
This doesn't mean that you can also run all operating systems in Xen -
I had only success with Linux and Windows - others seem to have
successfully tried OpenBSD. No Success reports yet for netBSD and
FreeBSD (unmodified! - with a special domU Kernel, NetBSD runs fine,
FreeBSD is said to do with Xen 3.0.2 but they currently have no domU
Kernel for latest Xen versions - additionally, they have differnent
PAE settings - you need the right hypervisor...)
There is some graphics problem with some newer linux live cd's, I
think I read something about the bootsplash that makes trouble, but
did not investigate further...
HTH,
Henning
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