> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ligesh [mailto:myself@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 31 January 2007 14:26
> To: Petersson, Mats
> Cc: Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: DomU boot fails with can't find root on Fedora 6
>
>
> Hi Pete,
>
> Do we need separate initrd for each ostemplate? In the stock
> kernel I got from xensource on centos 4.4, I was able to boot
> all domUs using the same initrd, and I had thought that that
> was the standard way. This is a big hassle actually, that for
> each domU distro, you have to use different initrd images.
Don't know who "Pete" is, but...
Well, you'll need an initrd that matches the kernel build that you've
got, anyways - i.e. a Kernel 2.6.19 will not (always) take kernel
modules built for 2.6.18 or 2.6.20 - never mind the fact that you may
have different settings for other things that affect the driver
interface.
Of course, DomU is a pretty well-defined environment - unless you expose
some hardware through the PCI hide/pass settings, your DomU will never
see any real hardware, so you don't REALLY need a modular kernel, one
with builtin drivers should be fine. That way you can eliminate the
initrd modules altogether, since all drivers are included in the kernel.
Obviously, Dom0 kernel has to cope with different types of SCSI, IDE,
SATA, SAS, RAID controllers, network cards from different manufacturers,
etc, etc. So building a kernel with all drivers included would make a
pretty large kernel, and using modules here makes sense to save memory
(since memory is only used by modules actually loaded).
Note also that you don't necessarily need a separate kernel for each OS
installation. As long as you're in the right ballpark with the kernel
version compared to the rest of the Guest OS - say for example CentOS
comes with a 2.6.16 kernel, you can replace it with a 2.6.18 kernel
wihtout too much risk. But a 2.6.5 kernel could be tricky to replace
with a 2.6.18 kernel, because it's too many things in the kernel that
has changed and some functions may not work exactly the same - then you
need to update other parts of the installation too, to get everything to
work.
So, what I'm saying is that you can build ONE DomU kernel that has all
the necessary drivers as "builtin" instead of "modules", and then use
that for multiple OS distributions. But bear in mind that some
distributions use extended kernel features, and those obviously will not
work if you take a "stock" Linux kernel.
--
Mats
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>
>
>
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