[Xen-users] CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 DomU on CentOS 5 Dom0: problems with hand-built OS and LVM

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been running any number of CentOS 4 based Xen hosts and guests 
using CentOS 4.4, and the Xen RPM's from www.xensource.com, and various 
hand-built OS images using jailtime and my own own OS images.
I like the jailtime approach:

   One partition for / on the DomU, /dev/sda1, built as a local file or 
local LVM partition
   One partiton for swap on the DomU, /dev/sda2, built as a local file 
or local LVM partition
The default .cfg from jailtime, and its variants, looks like this:

   kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xenU"
   memory = 256
   name = "centos.5-0"
   vif = [ '' ]
   dhcp = "dhcp"
   disk = ['file:/xen/centos/centos.5-0.img,sda1,w', 
'file:/xen/centos/centos.swap,sda2,w']
   root = "/dev/sda1 ro"

Unfortunately, this does *not* seem to work well with the CentOS 5 
kernel-xen: it does work with the xensource.com Dom0 kernels, and the 
old xensource.com DomU kernels seem to be just too darned old. the 
jailtime images and their like have *no* grub or bootloader on DomU, 
boot straight from the installed kernel on DomU and Dom0 for 
para-virtualization with the arguments in "root =" above.
By the way:  the differences betweent he jailtime setups, which I really 
like, and the virt-instlal and virt-manager built systems are legion and 
favor the stripped down jailtime setups. The virt-install systens use 
the Dom0 partitions as disk drives, *ALWAYS* called /dev/xvda and the 
like. This means that extracting the data from a paused or shutdown 
domain for backup purposes requires me looking *inside* that disk image, 
extracting the partition information (with tools like kpartx, I assume), 
and successfully mounting the partitions on Dom0 to image their 
ocntents. And I haven't worked that out yet, and I like having my 
partitions managed out of Dom, not leaving DomU to play with it.
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