On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 02:12:19PM +0100, Henning Sprang wrote:
> On 1/16/07, AndreGround <andreground@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >Hi,
> >I've made some other tests, including using "xvd" instead of "sda" devices
> >but without success.
> >
> >Any help is *REALLY* appreciated. Thanks.
>
> There are problems running other distributions on Fedora Xen when
> using the Fedora Xen Packages. That might also apply to older Fedora
> versions.
Do you mean running Fedora guest kernels in other distros ? Or running
other distro's guest kernels themselves ? The latter should be no problem
at all because we have made /zero/ change to the hypervisor ABI. The
former is tricky because very distro has different assumptions about the
way you construct initrd / what kernel modules are expected to to be
included in initrd, vs loaded later in boot process.
> Dan might hit me on the head for saying this, but Fedora/Redhat _do_
> things to the kernels and initrd that I call "strange" at best,
> because they introduce incompatibilities and make installing other
> distributions hard or impossible - I still didn't get Debian running
> on Fedora when using the Fedora Xen packages, and invested quite some
> time, while it is no problem with Xensource packages on Fedora - so
> it's pretty sure the kernel or initrd that is "wrong" or "strange" or
> "different". I can very well imagine that the same does also introduce
> problems when trying to run some old Fedora version.
Urm, we don't anything explicit to make other distros hard / impossible.
The biggest difference in terms of kernel though is that Fedora Xen
kernels are forward ported to be based on a current upstream kernel
base - ie 2.6.19 and soon to be 2.6.16, while XenSource kernels are
seemingly forever stuck on obsolete 2.6.16. The second main difference
is that in Fedora almost everything is compiled as a module, rather
than being builtin to a monolithic kernel. This matches the common
practice for bare-metal kernels, but is again different from XenSource
provided kernel binaries. There is certainly no change in the Hypervisor
guest ABI, so Fedora Xen hypervisor is fully compatible with any Xen
3.0.3 guest kernel built with matching featureset (ie, the PAE match)
> I don't know if that is by intention to keep business interests, or
> just by accident. But they seem to ignore the fact, as also others on
> fedora-xen state, that it is one important usage scenario for using
> xen: running different distributions for fun and profit.
Fedora has no business interests wrt to xen kernels. For kernel Fedora's
core & overriding goal is to also track the latest upstream kernel and apply
the latest recommended deployment policy from upstream kernel developers.
This leads to use forward porting Xen to recent kernels & compiling
everything as a module.
> Try making your own initrd with the options --with=xennet and
> --preload=xenblk options on the call to mkinitrd (give it another
> name than the original, to keep this original).
> And look at ethe fedora-xen list archives - this has been discussed
> there - search for initrd and debian.
Using Fedora guest kernels in a Debian distro will definitely require
playing around with initrd to figure out the set of modules Debian
needs. The best way is to use Debian's own Xen kernels - Debian actually
bases their kernels off the mercurial tree we provide for the Xen forward
port, so functionally they should be pretty much the same - the main
differences are in the way each distro chooses to set their kernel
build config.
Regards,
Dan.
--
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=|
|=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=|
|=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
|
Home