Re: [Fedora-xen] [fedora-virt] Fedora 12 Xen guests (domU) and hosts (dom0)

2010-01-15 Thread Pasi Kärkkäinen
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 01:54:09PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I thought of writing some information about running Fedora 12 Xen guests
> and also Fedora 12 Xen hosts/dom0.
> 
> Fedora 12 includes the upstream Linux pv_ops Xen domU support in the default 
> kernel.
> By using virt-install or virt-manager you can install Fedora 12 Xen PV 
> (paravirtual) guests directly from network, for example on RHEL 5.4, 
> CentOS 5.4, or Fedora Xen dom0/host.
> 
> If you want to run Fedora 12 Xen dom0 (host), there are some extra steps
> needed. Fedora 12 ships with Xen hypervisor and management tools 
> (Xen 3.4.1, and Xen 3.4.2 in the F12 updates), but the required Xen dom0 
> capable host kernel is not included in Fedora atm/yet.
> 
> General information about Xen dom0 status in Fedora: 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
> 
> There are a couple of different ways to get and install a Xen dom0
> capable kernel to Fedora 12 host:
> 
> - By using pre-packaged pv_ops xendom0 kernel rpms by M A Young. his 
> repository:
>   http://fedorapeople.org/~myoung/dom0/
> 
> - Compiling and installing Xen dom0 capable kernel yourself/manually.
>   
>   There are many options to choose from, full list of the available Xen
>   dom0 capable kernels is here:
>   http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDom0Kernels
> 
>   The recommended dom0 kernel is the pv_ops kernel, which is in the
>   process of being cleaned up for upstream/mainline Linux inclusion.
> 
>   More information about pv_ops dom0 kernel, including the status
>   reports:
>   http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps
> 
>   Xen developers are interested of both the success and failure reports
>   when using the Xen pv_ops dom0 kernel.
> 
> 
> Tips for running Xen with Fedora 12:
> 
>   - Make sure you install all the latest Fedora 12 updates, since they
> have an updated Xen version (3.4.2), and also fix a bug in
> python-virtinst tool to make Xen guest console keymaps work properly:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533707
> 
>   - Recent versions of Xen pv_ops dom0 kernel renamed some xen
> backend driver modules to have "xen-" prefix in them, for
> example evtchn module became xen-evtchn. Fedora Xen 3.4.2 init
> scripts take care of this, and load the correct modules, but
> Xen 3.4.1 doesn't do this automatically, causing xend fail to
> start in dom0/host before the modules are loaded manually.
> 
>   - There are some upcoming apic-related changes coming in pv_ops 
> dom0 kernel, which will require a patch to Xen hypervisor. 
> This patch is not yet included in the Fedora Xen rpms. 
> The patch will be added to Fedora Xen rpms when the upstream 
> pv_ops kernel starts to require/use it.
> 
>   - pv_ops dom0 kernel currently lacks blktap2 support, so using
> tap:aio: backend disk image files is not yet possible. 
> Xen file: backend image files work though. 
> 
> At the moment it's recommended to use LVM volumes for guest
> disks (Xen phy: backend).
> 
>   - virt-manager seems to work OK on Fedora 12 Xen dom0.
>   
>   - If you experience problems related to Fedora 12 guests (domU)
> kernel crashing (especially related to save/restore/migration), 
> install the latest Fedora updates to the guest. There has been 
> a lot of Xen guest related fixes in the upstream Linux recently. 
> These fixes will appear in Fedora when the kernel gets updated 
> to include the latest stable upstream fixes.
> 

Replying to myself again.. I forgot one thing from the list of tips:

- Disable selinux from /etc/selinux/config to make it easier to
  use custom directories for storing Xen guest image files and
  prevent other problems from happening.


-- Pasi

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Re: [Fedora-xen] [fedora-virt] Fedora 12 Xen guests (domU) and hosts (dom0) / grub.conf example

2010-01-15 Thread Pasi Kärkkäinen
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 01:54:09PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I thought of writing some information about running Fedora 12 Xen guests
> and also Fedora 12 Xen hosts/dom0.
> 
> Fedora 12 includes the upstream Linux pv_ops Xen domU support in the default 
> kernel.
> By using virt-install or virt-manager you can install Fedora 12 Xen PV 
> (paravirtual) guests directly from network, for example on RHEL 5.4, 
> CentOS 5.4, or Fedora Xen dom0/host.
> 
> If you want to run Fedora 12 Xen dom0 (host), there are some extra steps
> needed. Fedora 12 ships with Xen hypervisor and management tools 
> (Xen 3.4.1, and Xen 3.4.2 in the F12 updates), but the required Xen dom0 
> capable host kernel is not included in Fedora atm/yet.
>
> ...
> 

Oh, and here's an example of how to configure things in grub.conf for
Xen dom0.

Normal VGA console:

title Fedora Xen 3.4.2 / 2.6.31.6 dom0 kernel
root (hd0,0)
kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=512M loglvl=all guest_loglvl=all
module /vmlinuz-2.6.31.6 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_f12test-lv01 
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 KEYTABLE=fi nomodeset
module /initrd-2.6.31.6.img

Note the "nomodeset" option that is currently needed.


And also an example for using the onboard serial port as a serial console 
for debugging and logging the boot process:

title Fedora Xen 3.4.2 with serial console / 2.6.31.6 dom0 kernel
root (hd0,0)
kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=512M loglvl=all guest_loglvl=all com1=38400,8n1 
console=com1
module /vmlinuz-2.6.31.6 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_f12test-lv01 
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 KEYTABLE=fi nomodeset console=hvc0 
earlyprintk=xen nomodeset
module /initrd-2.6.31.6.img


Using a virtual serial port like SOL (Serial Over LAN) from a server management 
processor,
or an IPMI card, or Intel AMT/vPro management chip might require you to specify 
the 
IOport aswell, like this in grub.conf:

kernel /xen.gz  com1=38400,8n1,0xcf00,0 console=com1

Where 0xcf00 is the IO port for the PCI serial port (you can check it by 
running lspci -vvv in Linux), 
and ",0" is the IRQ, which can usually be left to 0.

-- Pasi

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