Hi. May I ask what happened to the XenCD stuff that one finds all over google when searching for Xen? Near as I can tell, this was a Xen 1.2 thing that the Xen team decided to remove sometime after. But I can''t find whether it was removed for technical reasons, time required to maintain, "some distro should do that instead", or what. I have the technical skills to put together a bootable Xen CD including a run-from-RAM initrd image, and wanted to check if such an effort would be frowned upon or encouraged by the Xen team. Or avoid wasting my time if there are technical problems I''ll encounter making one for Xen 2. -- jared@wordzoo.com "Better to be of a rare breed than a long line." -- TDK ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/ _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel
> Hi. May I ask what happened to the XenCD stuff that one finds all > over google when searching for Xen? Near as I can tell, this was a > Xen 1.2 thing that the Xen team decided to remove sometime after.I was working on it but never finished it off. We weren''t so worried about it for Xen 2.0 since hard drive installs and setting up test VMs are now much easier than they were.> But I can''t find whether it was removed for technical reasons, time > required to maintain, "some distro should do that instead", or what.Basically a time thing. I''ve kept the build tree around so that I could look at it later but I didn''t get round to it in the end...> I have the technical skills to put together a bootable Xen CD > including a run-from-RAM initrd image, and wanted to check if such an > effort would be frowned upon or encouraged by the Xen team. Or avoid > wasting my time if there are technical problems I''ll encounter making > one for Xen 2.If you did that, it would be fantastic :-) The Xen 1.2 CD is based on RH 9 and includes the tools / instructions required to rebuild it. We could supply you with a copy of this image, or you could try using a more up to date and less hacked (our demo CD lacked things like the RPM database) image. Cheers muchly, Mark ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/ _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel
[Mark == maw48@cantab.net on Wed, 15 Dec 2004 17:29:20 +0000]
Mark> I was working on [XenDemoCD] but never finished it off. We
Mark> weren''t so worried about it for Xen 2.0 since hard drive
Mark> installs and setting up test VMs are now much easier than they
Mark> were. [...] Basically a time thing.
Ok, thanks for the answer. I had no problem getting Xen 2.0 running
on a machine, so your instincts are correct there.
There are other reasons for liking bootable CDs, and frozen images in
general, however. My current interest in a bootable CD is for a
higher-reliability production server. I don''t want corruption or
accidental/intentional dom0 changes to create problems whereby every
VM has problems starting.
If the box instead booted off a CD with a frozen network
configuration, and then auto-discovered and auto-started VMs, then
worse case, a reboot of the physical box should get back to the same
state, repeatedly. And creating a 2nd box that worked the same would
be completely trivial.
Perhaps I''m thinking more about Xen "appliances" than I am
"demo" at
this point, but there''s overlap in the ideas, which I think would be
very cool. 1 CD (well maybe DVD) for "Xen with Debian" and "Xen
with
RedHat" as grub options would be grand.
There''s room for a lot of different perspectives on what a
"bootable
Xen CD" should look like. Fortunately, multiple bootable views can be
supported on 1 CD.
There''s at least these dimensions to consider about any XenCD design:
- light distro (ttylinux, damn small linux) or fat distro (Fedora,
Debian, Knoppix, etc)?
- RedHat, Debian/Knoppix, Gentoo, LFS, Yet Another Branch?
- graphical/desktop dom0 or headless/server dom0 oriented?
- "Xen demo" oriented or production oriented?
- autostart example or production domains?
- frozen config or post-boot configuration based on on-disk files or
network parameters?
- what xenolinux/initrd/rootfs combinations available for kicking
off additional example/production livecds?
- run from ram or run from iso fs?
Comments about people''s preferences would be welcome.
I have my own perspective, as does every other live cd creator, so
it''s unlikely that whatever I end up with would match what others are
expecting. That''s a reasonable sign that a "Xen live cd
builder"/modular approach or a script instead of an iso may be a
better initial goal.
Mark> The Xen 1.2 CD is based on RH 9 and includes the tools /
Mark> instructions required to rebuild it. We could supply you with
Mark> a copy of this image, or you could try using a more up to date
Mark> and less hacked (our demo CD lacked things like the RPM
Mark> database) image.
I would appreciate a copy of the image and/or the tools directory. I
couldn''t seem to clone the 1.2 branch out of bkbits.
Shouldn''t be
strictly necessary for me to create one, but it''s always good to see
other''s examples.
-- jared@wordzoo.com
"Tiger gotta hunt. Bird gotta fly.
Man gotta sit and wonder why, why, why.
Tiger gotta sleep. Bird gotta land.
Man gotta tell himself he understand." -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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Jared Rhine wrote:> Comments about people''s preferences would be welcome.Any Xen liveCd is enough for demoing and playing around with Xen, I''d say. And I''d welcome this for showing the thing around at work and so. For actually doing something with it, I''d love to see Xen somehow as a custom module or something for Morphix. When Xen 2.1 comes out (and AGP and other hardware works flawlessly), it would be nice to get a Xen kernel as an alternative or even the only kernel for some official live CD - so for example Ubuntu LiveCD could contain Xen functionality always. -- Naked ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/ _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel