Alexander Dubinin
2007-Apr-14 08:06 UTC
[Xen-users] PV drivers for HVM legacy Linux guests
Hi all, I''ve found some talks in this maillist that "ioemu is deprecated" and "use PV drivers"... Unfortunately, I''ve not been able to find any hint in documentation how to do it for Linux. Googling also not gives any usable results, but ADs of commercial solutions like VI/XenSource or just blogs with rumors how good PV drivers are... And ioemu is still in all docs as the only HVM way to access disk/network... Does anybody have a hint - how to make HVM paravirtualized drivers working? I''ve tried these from latest XEN sources (from "unmodified_driver") on SLES10, but they have not able to keep system alive more than 3-5 minutes (It have enough time to boot and get IP address from DHCP, connect to NIS/KDC, but then hangs). Also, even then "ioemu" option is not used, device emulation is still working for HVM domains. Is it possible, that this causing conflicts with blk/net-front drivers and resulted hang? How to _really_ disable ioemu, and how to avoid problems with legacy tools (like boot loaders) support in this case? Is XEN BIOS image working through hypercalls to access block devices directly and implement int13? Or it''s still same crapy BIOS image from QEMU? Anyway, I don''t need to use SLES10 in that way, as it have PV mode working good enough with same kernel... Real need is to run SLES9 SP3 in HVM mode with PV drivers. So far I''ve not been able to compile these even for latest SLES9 kernel (Which is quite old - 2.6.5-xxx). It''s not possible to use SLES9 in para-virtualized mode - as it requires much newer kernel to be installed, which is not acceptable... Versons of XEN tried: 3.0.4 from xensource, 3.0.4.1 from Novell forge (of April 4-th) Any thoughts, hints or ideas? -- Regards, Alex _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users