Just curious:
Suppose I have a system with several separate boot partitions on it and several version of linux on the different partitions.
Can I install the Xen kernel on one of them, then teach Xen to run the existing kernels from the other boot partitions as guests?
Or does Xen insist on being the one who installed things to be able to run them?
Let's make it an even bigger challenge: Suppose the kernels are a mix of i386 and x86_64 kernels, can Xen run mixed architecture guests at the same time?
(There is so much marketing hyperbabble on the Xen web sites, I can't ever seem to find the answer to concrete questions like this :-).
Tom Horsley <tomhorsley <at> adelphia.net> writes:
Just curious:
Suppose I have a system with several separate boot partitions on it and several version of linux on the different partitions.
Can I install the Xen kernel on one of them, then teach Xen to run the existing kernels from the other boot partitions as guests?
Or does Xen insist on being the one who installed things to be able to run them?
Let's make it an even bigger challenge: Suppose the kernels are a mix of i386 and x86_64 kernels, can Xen run mixed architecture guests at the same time?
(There is so much marketing hyperbabble on the Xen web sites, I can't ever seem to find the answer to concrete questions like this .
************************************************************** In response to your questions....,
Why not just migrate your boot images to another drive, install and configure Xen, then migrate the images to your new Xen- Domains? By the time you fish all over the net for answers that, for all you know, may not even be there, you could have finished the above procedure and have your "Xen-Server" up and running. - - Benster!
On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 19:31 +0000, Benton W Middleton wrote:
Why not just migrate your boot images to another drive, install and configure Xen, then migrate the images to your new Xen- Domains? By the time you fish all over the net for answers that, for all you know, may not even be there, you could have finished the above procedure and have your "Xen-Server" up and running.
NO, *you* could have it up and running, I'm still trying to find that beginning of the conversation that everyone else is in the middle of. There is absolutely no handle on any Xen documentation to give an absolute novice any idea what the heck is happening - its all circular references back to other Xen threads :-).
On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 13:27 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
Just curious:
Suppose I have a system with several separate boot partitions on it and several version of linux on the different partitions.
Can I install the Xen kernel on one of them, then teach Xen to run the existing kernels from the other boot partitions as guests?
Or does Xen insist on being the one who installed things to be able to run them?
You can only run *unmodified* OSes on VT or Pacifica hardware.
If you don't then you will need to run Xenified kernel's to boot each of them, but yes you can use the existing boot partitions and define them as xvda's in the domU config, eg:
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/hda1,xvda1,w', 'phy:/dev/hdb4,xvdb1,w' ]
Let's make it an even bigger challenge: Suppose the kernels are a mix of i386 and x86_64 kernels, can Xen run mixed architecture guests at the same time?
No sure on this one.
Take care,
Gawain