[Fedora-xen] Fedora 12 Xen guests (domU) and hosts (dom0)

[Serg Smirnoff]

Thanks for sharing this! Good tips.

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi> 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.
>
>
> Hopefully that helps :)
>
> -- Pasi
>
> --
> xen mailing list
> xen at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen
>



-- 
Serg Smirnov
email/xmpp: Sergey.A.Smirnov at Gmail.com