Pallab Chakrabarty wrote:>I want to use a flat file system as disk instead of an image, like: > > disk = [''file:/tmp/server,sda1,w'', ]BTW - on top of all the other comments, putting anything important in /tmp is a bad idea, bits of it are liable to disappear without warning when your cleanup job runs. I''ll leave it to your imagination how I found out how annoying that can be ! -- Simon Hobson Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books. _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
Pallab Chakrabarty wrote:>But still I want to know what holds not to use directory structure as >disk. Becoz the error results here due to kernel only.. > >Cant be fixed ?? or Xen has limitations in some way..It is not supported by Xen. And I''d very much doubt if it will ever be supported. Natively, Xen supports disk images - either as a partition on a disk (or an LVM volume), or as a file. If you want the guest to use a file structure on the hosts filesystem, then you will need to treat it as you would a diskless machine - export the filesystem from the host (eg via NFS) and mount it as a network filesystem on the guest. -- Simon Hobson Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books. _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
Pallab Chakrabarty wrote:> > Hi, > > Thanks for the reply.. > > But still I want to know what holds not to use directory structure as > disk. Becoz the error results here due to kernel only..if you think about it in terms of the emulation architecture, you''ll see it doesn''t make sense. remember that Xen emulates hardware, typical OSs are build to deal with hardware. and hardware doesn''t know about files on a directory. disks know only how to read and write data blocks (that''s why they''re called block devices). if you want ''more intelligent'' hardware, or imagine a high level driver that deals with files, pretty soon you''ve reinvented NFS/CIFS/whatever. that error is typical when you specify a non-existant device as ''root device'' on the kernel command line. i''d guess that Xen ignores your ''directory device'' and doesn''t present a disk to the DomU. then the kernel simply doesn''t find the ''hardware'' to mount. -- Javier _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
Javier Guerra wrote:> if you want ''more intelligent'' hardware, or imagine a high level driver that deals with files, pretty soon you''ve reinvented NFS/CIFS/whatever.of course, that''s not a totally bad idea... here''s a proposal about using Plan9''s distributed filesystem just for this: http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/4/41/KvmForum2008$kdf2008_16.pdf i don''t know if there has been any more work on this -- Javier _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users