[Xen-devel] HEADS UP, the game of hardcoded pathes and the results

[Christoph Egger <Christoph.Egger@xxxxxxx>]

Hi!

As everyone noticed, I have submitted a lot of patches which removed
hardcoded pathes from the whole xen and ioemu trees.

With xen c/s 19873 and ioemu c/s b471f03d51cde3976b6d52179ca2a86d8906a587
(and newer) you have a source tree with all patches in it.

The benefits from the changes:

1. Multiple xen installations in different directories.

   Compile the sources with PREFIX="<your-install-dir>" gmake
   Install xen into the directory.
   *Before* you start xend, make sure to set the
       PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PYTHONPATH environment variables
   to the correct pathes which start with <your-install-dir>.
   When they are set correct, then
   "which xend" and "which xm" finds xend and xm in the install-dir,
   python should find the modules used by xend and xm and the dynamic
   linker finds the libs like libxc.

   When you don't set PREFIX, then all behaves the old way.

   To switch between different installations, first stop xend and all daemons.
   Change PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PYTHONPATH to the new pathes
   and then restart xend.

   This is a nice feature to test different developments / bugfixing tasks
   based on same changeset.


2. Easy packaging for distributions.

    When a distributor packages xen, there are always a good amount
    of patches which modify the buildsystem to sqeeze xen into the
    infrastructure. Now that hardcoded pathes are gone, there should only
    a few patches necessary.


3. Guest migration - Cross-Dom0.

    Linux, Solaris and NetBSD, all have their own default install directories.
    Guest migration between them failed because the hvmloader or qemu-dm
    aren't found at the specified location in the guest config file.
    Now you can replace

           kernel = '/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader'
           device_model = '/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm'

    with

           kernel = 'hvmloader'
           device_model = 'qemu-dm'

    and xen finds hvmloader and qemu-dm itself in the install directory
    and guest migration works.
    (Actually it always worked by design but never by implementation
     because of this.)
    Note: There are some unfixable details like network bridge interfaces
       having different names.


Enjoy,

Christoph



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