Re: [Fedora-xen] Final F12 2.6.32.x dom0 kernel and vanilla 2.6.37-rc4

2010-12-02 Thread W. Michael Petullo
 I have built what may be my last Fedora 12 kernel 
 (2.6.32.26-174.2.xendom0.fc12) as Fedora 12 EOLs today (this is the same 
 Fedora patch level as the official 2.6.32.26-175.fc12 kernel which has 
 just been released). It is available at 
 http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2637740 and the
 repository http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/myoung/dom0-kernel/
 and includes a crash on exit fix. I haven't decided whether I am going to 
 build any more 2.6.32.x kernels, I am going to continue building 2.6.37 
 kernels but these aren't ready for full dom0 use yet.

Moving forward and for the purposes of Fedora 15 development, can we get
both patched 2.7.37/38 kernels that support DomU and raw upstream
kernels? Or does xen/next-2.6.27 not have the requisite features yet
anyway?

This kernel works as expected with one exception. The exception has been
a nagging problem, but I have not reported it because 1) we are using
a research OS in DomU and 2) we are not clear if the problem is in our
code, Linux or Xen. But, here are the symptoms:

Occasionally (this seems to correlate to network activity between Dom0
and DomU), the system becomes unresponsive. I am running the Michael
Young kernel at runlevel 3 within Dom0 (very little memory used by
applications). Our OS runs in DomU and is constrained to 128MB of
memory. When the system is unresponsive, typing a character into a
Dom0 console take 2-5 seconds to appear on the screen. Likewise, other
activity is extremely slow. As I mentioned, we have not been able to
isolate where the problem is. Running, for example, an OpenWrt Linux
build in DomU does not have this problem.

 For those of you that are trying 2.6.37, I have built a vanilla 2.6.37-rc4
 kernel (no additional xen patches) at
 http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2635700

This kernel is the first from the 37/38 series that I have tested since
I tested the initial upstream Xen accept. This seems to work within my
expectations with two exceptions:

1. There are some warning related to nouveaufb. When I have time I will
investigate a bit more, but 2.6.32 never really worked right for me with
the nouveau drivers either.

2. On the positive side, it seems that the console back-end driver
works. When I booted a DomU OS I received console messages. This surprised
me. Soon after, Xen was unable to set up the networking for DomU, which
is what I expected.

Dom0 continued to operate fine even though loading an OS in DomU failed.

-- 
Mike

:wq
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Re: [Fedora-xen] Final F12 2.6.32.x dom0 kernel and vanilla 2.6.37-rc4

2010-12-02 Thread Pasi Kärkkäinen
On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 09:17:41PM +, M A Young wrote:
 On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
 
  Moving forward and for the purposes of Fedora 15 development, can we get
  both patched 2.7.37/38 kernels that support DomU and raw upstream
  kernels? Or does xen/next-2.6.27 not have the requisite features yet
  anyway?
 
 xen/next-2.6.37 doesn't currently have kernel drivers for either block or 
 network backends. Userspace block or network backends may be possible but 
 I don't know how to get them to work, though it is supposed to be 
 possible.
 

Userspace qemu xen_blkback is included in current xen-unstable (4.1), afaik.

-- Pasi

  This kernel works as expected with one exception. The exception has been
  a nagging problem, but I have not reported it because 1) we are using
  a research OS in DomU and 2) we are not clear if the problem is in our
  code, Linux or Xen. But, here are the symptoms:
 
  Occasionally (this seems to correlate to network activity between Dom0
  and DomU), the system becomes unresponsive. I am running the Michael
  Young kernel at runlevel 3 within Dom0 (very little memory used by
  applications). Our OS runs in DomU and is constrained to 128MB of
  memory. When the system is unresponsive, typing a character into a
  Dom0 console take 2-5 seconds to appear on the screen. Likewise, other
  activity is extremely slow. As I mentioned, we have not been able to
  isolate where the problem is. Running, for example, an OpenWrt Linux
  build in DomU does not have this problem.
 
 I have seen something similar, though I don't know where the fault 
 lies either.
 
   Michael Young
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