This is just a resend of my previous email that I
mistakenly have sent to the mail list admin rather than the list.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 4:34 AM
Subject: Experience, and questions in using Xen 1.2 with new control
tool
Hi all,
'Great work!' to The Xen
team. In general I think the hypervisor is much more stable and the
control tool is much more coherent and centralized in v1.2.
Although I encountered some
problems (below) in installing multiple domains' filesystems in my harddrive and
it has been a long day to fix them, after everything is ready one can be
familiar with the new tool very quickly. With just some alias and shell
script I can use multiple configs for different domains and use the general
control tool to play with them comfortably.
Some questions and
remarks:
1) After starting new domain I
can only ssh to it by 'ssh root@xxxxxxxxxxx' but not as what in the
README.CD of Xen 1.2 (and earlier) says to ssh with port number 2200 +
domain_id, if so I would get connection refused. I have started 'xen_nat_enable'
am I setting anything wrong or missing anything? Or just leave it?
2) 'xc destroy' is so
powerful that it can kill Domain 0 directly without even a
checking or a prompt, if the admin (likely be root) accidentally key in 0 and
enter without serious checking this may cause troubles.
3) I am using 256MB in my laptop
running 128MB for domain 0, but I can't use up the rest of the memory for other
domains. Is there any upper bound? By the way I have tried running a
domain by just using 8MB memory and ssh it successfully. (2MB is not enough for
kernel and 4MB with applications complaining not enough pages) And one more is
that if there is not enough memory the return message will be 'error creating domain', it would be useful if it can point to
something related to memory.
4) I am not sure if the
suspend/restore function is ready. But I have tried Create->Stop->Save a
domain and Restore->Start it again. The network interface and sshd seem
totally down after restore, if the sshd is down seems there is no way to rescue
it (will this push the read/write console for domains upper on the to-do
list?:-)
The
'cpu_time' displayed by 'xc list' of the saved and then restored
domain seems not accurate, I am not entirely sure about this I will try to
reproduce and report later. Be aware that the restore function starts the domain
in the newest domain_id rather than it's orginal id, so the IP address of it would look different to the new
domain_id after restored. I have experieced once (I remember when using
just 8/16MB memory) that after a domain is restored it keeps generate error
message like the followings, is this normal?
===========================================================
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in
ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)):
ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=2862,
block=93 DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write:
IO failure DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_orphan_add: IO
failure DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to
read inode block - inode=2862, block=93 DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device
hd(3,11)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure DOM17: EXT3-fs error
(device hd(3,11)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block -
inode=2862,
block=93 ===========================================================
5) Just a minor one, in the
README.CD for Xen1.2 (and before), in the section "Installing the file systems
from the CD", when copying the files to /usr the directory 'root' is included,
which seems not appropriate. And there were some directories inside 'local'
which don't seem appropriate (some personal files I think) as well, which you
may not want to include in the next ISO. Can't wait to see the official Xen
1.2 really.
Hope this helps. More to
come.
Cheers,
Yan-Ching CHU
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