Re: [Xen-devel] Getting GUI to work with Xen PVMs

[Priya <pbhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

I have a 32 bit single processor dual core machines without hardware support for virtualization on which I want to install the latest stable version of Xen (4.0.0 ?), and then create a couple of para-virtual machines.

One of my requirements is to be able to access my PVMs remotely and run graphics bases applications (glxgears, x11-perf, etc) on them. (An API similar to XenCenter that works for Citrix XenServer, and in which you can access the console of all your VMs from a remote machine would be even better).  

I would like to get some recommendations about which is the good host operating system, Xen version/settings and guest operating system to get this to work. I found this and this documentation about installing Xen on Ubuntu 10.04 server and virt-install (which I do not fully understand yet.) 

One thought is to use Ubuntu 10.04 as my host OS, install Xen 4.0.0 and then get  Ubuntu-xen-desktop working with a graphical interface as my PVM. Would this be the correct way to proceed? Any thoughts or comments would be useful!

I guess most of my questions are rather naive. I apologize for that but I am yet to see a Xen PVM with a GUI!

Thanks!

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Priya <pbhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for responding, Dan!

Here is the (partial) output of "xm info":

---

-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/sbin/xm info

Password:

release                : 2.6.18-xen

version                : #1 SMP Sat Mar 1 14:47:04 EST 2008

machine                : i686

nr_cpus                : 2

nr_nodes               : 1

sockets_per_node       : 2

cores_per_socket       : 1

threads_per_core       : 1

cpu_mhz                : 3200

hw_caps                : bfebfbff:20000000:00000000:00000180:0000641d

total_memory           : 4095

free_memory            : 0

xen_major              : 3

xen_minor              : 1

xen_extra              : .0

xen_caps               : xen-3.0-x86_32p 

xen_scheduler          : credit

xen_pagesize           : 4096

platform_params        : virt_start=0xf5800000

xen_changeset          : unavailable

cc_compiler            : gcc version 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-33)

cc_compile_by          : root

cc_compile_date        : Sat Mar  1 13:44:07 EST 2008

xend_config_format     : 4

--

You are right. This thing is ancient. I do not have root privileges on this machine and cannot change the xen-version. Do you think I could perhaps work around this problem somehow! :-( 

All I need to do for the time being is to get the GUI based application to work via the network really.

Cheers

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Use “xm info” in dom0 to find out the Xen version.  If it is indeed Xen 3.0, that is so ancient that recent kernels are bound to have some problems.

 

From: Priya [mailto:pbhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, July 19, 2010 4:43 PM
To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-devel] Getting GUI to work with Xen PVMs

 

All,

I am working with Xen 3.0 (I think, though can someone please tell me how I could verify this!)

 

I want to install a couple of PVM which I could access with a X-terminal. (I don't know if I am using the correct terminology here, so I will elaborate: I want to start my PVM, ssh to them using the -X option [ssh -X user@pvm_ip] from another machine, and be able to run a command like "glxgears", so that a pop up window showing the gears-animation shows up and the console prints the FPS information).

 

At this point, I already have a PVM installed running a guest OS with kernel 2.6.24-16-xen. However when I try to install "nvidia-glx" for the glxgears API I get the following error:

 

----------------

root@xen13:~# sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  binutils-static cpp cpp-4.2 libdrm2 libfontenc1 libfreetype6 libgl1-mesa-glx

  libglu1-mesa libhal1 libice6 libpixman-1-0 libsm6 libx11-6 libx11-data

  libxau6 libxaw7 libxcb-xlib0 libxcb1 libxdamage1 libxdmcp6 libxext6

  libxfixes3 libxfont1 libxi6 libxkbfile1 libxmu6 libxpm4 libxt6 libxxf86vm1

  linux-restricted-modules-common mdetect x11-xkb-utils xserver-xorg

  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev

  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

  xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xserver-xorg-input-wacom

Suggested packages:

  cpp-doc gcc-4.2-locales libfreetype6-dev nvidia-kernel-source

  nvidia-settings xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable gsynaptics

  ksynaptics qsynaptics wacom-tools

Recommended packages:

  displayconfig-gtk libgl1-mesa-dri xfonts-base

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  binutils-static cpp cpp-4.2 libdrm2 libfontenc1 libfreetype6 libgl1-mesa-glx

  libglu1-mesa libhal1 libice6 libpixman-1-0 libsm6 libx11-6 libx11-data

  libxau6 libxaw7 libxcb-xlib0 libxcb1 libxdamage1 libxdmcp6 libxext6

  libxfixes3 libxfont1 libxi6 libxkbfile1 libxmu6 libxpm4 libxt6 libxxf86vm1

  linux-restricted-modules-common mdetect nvidia-glx x11-xkb-utils

  xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all

  xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse

  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

  xserver-xorg-input-wacom

0 upgraded, 42 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

7 not fully installed or removed.

Need to get 0B/14.4MB of archives.

After this operation, 41.2MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

Extracting templates from packages: 100%

Preconfiguring packages ...

Setting up x11-common (1:7.3+10ubuntu10.2) ...

Segmentation fault

dpkg: error processing x11-common (--configure):

 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 139

Errors were encountered while processing:

 x11-common

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

 

-------------------

 

 I Googled this error and found a number of suggestions. But all the suggested work-arounds lead me to this same error. What am I missing here?

 

Do I indeed need to install nvidia-glx on my PVM ?

Any advice would be helpful!

--

Priya Bhat

 

 

--

Priya Bhat

--

Priya Bhat

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