Ubuntu as DomU under Xen/FC5

[George Hill]

I have FC5 running Xen, or perhaps it is the other way
'round, as Dom0. I have installed another copy of FC5
as a DomU, no problem. Now I am want to install Ubuntu
as another guest. The instructions that I have read
are all for installing Ubuntu on a system running
Xen/Ubuntu and use debootstrap to boot the system. But
debootstrap is a Debian package -- how would I run it
under FC5? Or, simply, how could I go about installing
Ubuntu under FC5/Xen? Thanks.

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[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006, George Hill wrote:
>  I have FC5 running Xen, or perhaps it is the other way
>  'round, as Dom0. I have installed another copy of FC5
>  as a DomU, no problem. Now I am want to install Ubuntu
>  as another guest. The instructions that I have read
>  are all for installing Ubuntu on a system running
>  Xen/Ubuntu and use debootstrap to boot the system. But
>  debootstrap is a Debian package -- how would I run it
>  under FC5? Or, simply, how could I go about installing
>  Ubuntu under FC5/Xen? Thanks. 
I just keep a tarball of a debootstrap'ed minimal debian install
on my FC5 box and use that to bootstrap new customer Xens.
Bout the only problem I've had with Xen/FC5 is the kernel crashes
which take out the networking - so I run a locally compiled kernel.
The FC5 domU kernel -does- run an Ubuntu/debian system fine.
Just be sure to add xennet to /etc/modules or your networking
won't be very friendly; and install the module utilities package
so you can load modules into the domU kernel at domU boot time.

A minimalistic debootstrap'ed debian system isn't that big.

-rw-r--r-- 1 adrian adrian 49267331 Jul 10 22:18 debian-base.tar.gz




Adrian

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 04:11:07PM -0700, George Hill wrote:
>  I have FC5 running Xen, or perhaps it is the other way
>  'round, as Dom0. I have installed another copy of FC5
>  as a DomU, no problem. Now I am want to install Ubuntu
>  as another guest. The instructions that I have read
>  are all for installing Ubuntu on a system running
>  Xen/Ubuntu and use debootstrap to boot the system. But
>  debootstrap is a Debian package -- how would I run it
>  under FC5? Or, simply, how could I go about installing
>  Ubuntu under FC5/Xen? Thanks. 
Its unfortunate that most other distros seem to have gone in the direction
of using some bootstrap / chroot method to installs guest FS images, because
its pretty much doomed to fail in a mixed host/guest environment such as
Ubuntu on Fedora. This is why the Fedora approach to creating guests has 
been to boot the regular installer (anaconda) using a xen guest kernel - it
lets people easily install Fedora guests on non-Fedora hosts.

There's a couple of options I can think of

  - Try and boot the Ubuntu installer using the Ubuntu  Xen guest kernel
    and hope it 'just works'.
  - Run the Ubuntu installer inside QEMU instance, and then install the
    kernel-xen inside QEMU. Finally shutdown QEMU & create  a Xen config
    file to boot the image created via QEMU
  - Use a bare-metal Ubuntu host to create the image & then copy it across
    to the Fedora host to run within Xen
  - Manually install debootstrap from sources on Fedora & see if you can
    get it working

If the first option doesn't work it'd be worth creating a bug report for
Debian recommending they try & get it working, because booting regular
installer with a xen guest kernel is by far the most portable way of 
creating guest images in mixed environments, since its totally isolated
from whatever the host happens to run.

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  [phone] -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=|

[Rik van Riel]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:

>  Its unfortunate that most other distros seem to have gone in the
> direction
>  of using some bootstrap / chroot method to installs guest FS images, because
>  its pretty much doomed to fail in a mixed host/guest environment such as
>  Ubuntu on Fedora.  
Even more fun, it will probably break when you try to install
Ubuntu version N + 1 on an Ubuntu version N system, because
no doubt the new distro will put slightly different requirements
on the chroot installer...

-- 
"You don't have to be crazy to do this... but it helps." -- Bob Ross

[George Hill]

Thanks Dan --

This gets confusing/tricky...

What exactly do you mean by "the Ubuntu installer"?

Ubuntu says that to install Xen on Ubuntu you should
download Xen from XenSource and integrate it with your
Ubuntu installation
(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XenOnUbuntuBinaryInstall).
I am not sure if there is an Ubuntu Xen kernel.

I used xenguest-install.py to install the FC5 guest,
but I am not sure that will work with Ubuntu. Will I
need to create my own config file in /etc/xen?

Thanks for your help, any more tips would be
appreciated.

--- "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 04:11:07PM -0700, George
>  Hill wrote:
>  > I have FC5 running Xen, or perhaps it is the other
>  way
>  > 'round, as Dom0. I have installed another copy of
>  FC5
>  > as a DomU, no problem. Now I am want to install
>  Ubuntu
>  > as another guest. The instructions that I have
>  read
>  > are all for installing Ubuntu on a system running
>  > Xen/Ubuntu and use debootstrap to boot the system.
>  But
>  > debootstrap is a Debian package -- how would I run
>  it
>  > under FC5? Or, simply, how could I go about
>  installing
>  > Ubuntu under FC5/Xen? Thanks.
>  
>  Its unfortunate that most other distros seem to have
>  gone in the direction
>  of using some bootstrap / chroot method to installs
>  guest FS images, because
>  its pretty much doomed to fail in a mixed host/guest
>  environment such as
>  Ubuntu on Fedora. This is why the Fedora approach to
>  creating guests has 
>  been to boot the regular installer (anaconda) using
>  a xen guest kernel - it
>  lets people easily install Fedora guests on
>  non-Fedora hosts.
>  
>  There's a couple of options I can think of
>  
>    - Try and boot the Ubuntu installer using the
>  Ubuntu  Xen guest kernel
>      and hope it 'just works'.
>    - Run the Ubuntu installer inside QEMU instance,
>  and then install the
>      kernel-xen inside QEMU. Finally shutdown QEMU &
>  create  a Xen config
>      file to boot the image created via QEMU
>    - Use a bare-metal Ubuntu host to create the image
>  & then copy it across
>      to the Fedora host to run within Xen
>    - Manually install debootstrap from sources on
>  Fedora & see if you can
>      get it working
>  
>  If the first option doesn't work it'd be worth
>  creating a bug report for
>  Debian recommending they try & get it working,
>  because booting regular
>  installer with a xen guest kernel is by far the most
>  portable way of 
>  creating guest images in mixed environments, since
>  its totally isolated
>  from whatever the host happens to run.
>  
>  Regards,
>  Dan.
>  -- 
>  |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies,
>  Boston.  [phone] -=|
>  |=-           Perl modules:
>  http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
>  |=-               Projects:
>  http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
>  |=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1
>  B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=| 
>   

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Installing a second guest OS of same FC6 Test2 fails in Fc6 Test2 Dom0 with PAE error

[shobha ranganathan]

I have a Dom0 FC6 Test2. I installed one guest with FC6 Test2 and it worked fine.
  Of course I needed to rebuild xen3.0.2 with pae=y.
   
  when I installed second guest OS with same FC6 Test2, I get the error in
/var/log/xend-debug.log that
   
  ERROR: PAE kernel on non-PAE host
  ERROR: Error constructing guest OS
  I also get VMError: (9, 'Bad File Descriptor').
   
  while /var/log/xend.log gives me 
  (XenBootLoader:83) Boot Loader didn't return any data!
   
  What did I miss here ? I have the same Dom0 kernel that has a successful one guest
install of FC6 TEst2.
   
  Thanks for your help
  Shobha



 			
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