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 -- xen mailing list xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen
