Hi,
I'm trying to get Xen 3.4.1 working on CentOS 5.5(64bit) for a Dell R710 box(Quad Core Xeon "Nehalem" processor, 12 GB Memory and 2 Seagate SATA HDD). I followed the README to make world, make install, generate the corresponding ram disk with initrd, and modified /boot/menu.lst. I believe I didn't make any mistake through these steps, because I was able to get Xen 3.4.1 running on CentOS 5.5 for a Dell Optiplex 745 box (Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB memory and 1 SATA HDD) with the same procedure.
However, for the R710 box, once I reboot the server and boot with Xen, the system enters a halt that lasts forever, and all I got on the console was this:
--------------------------------
Booting command-list
root (hd0,1)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/xen.gz
[Multiboot-elf, <0x100000:0x11f770:0x6b890>, shtab=0x28b078, entry=0x100000]
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen ro root=UUID=c25415f0-1eff-4b3e-a03b-99c3fecb
be57 console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 selinux=0
[Multiboot-module @ 0x28c000, 0x73b340 bytes]
module /boot/initrd-2.6.18.8-xen.img
[Multiboot-module @ 0x9c8000, 0x48ebc00 bytes]
--------------------------------
No error message at all... So my guess is that the system halts right after the grub loading. But, has the hypervisor booted? what causes the halt?
I have tried three different ways to get Xen working on my R710 setup, but they all ended up with the same bizarre output.
1) Building from source for Xen 3.4.3, Xen 3.3.2, Xen 3.1.4;
2) Using yum to install binary for Xen 3.4.3, Xen 3.0.3 (the stock Xen comes with CentOS 5.5) (I came across a post here mentioning someone successfully get Xen 3.0.3 (CentOS 5.4) running on R710).
3) Building linux-2.6.18.8-xen with the existing CentOS kernel configuration file. I copied the existing configuration file into the build-linux-2.6.18-xen_x86_64 directory and followed the README on how to build the kernel with .config under the build-linux-2.6.18-xen_x86_64 directory. For all remaining configure questions during compiling, I chose the default option.
Up to this point, I'm totally clueless on how to solve this problem. Has anyone seen this problem before, or any insight to share? I would really appreciate the help.
Thanks,
--
Bill