Fedora xen - Jun 2006 - Xen install of other than FC5 on FC5 Dom0

Hi all,

It appears that I can only build FC5 guests on my FC5 machine.

Anyone have any pointers to documentation that can explain creating
guests of another distribution, such as Rawhide, on my FC5 box?

Ian

Well in a hurry but you can install most any distribution you want, I have
probably 5, suse, ubuntu, debian, the only one that I haven''t is
FreeBSD (on
my to do list).  The distributions don''t make it as easy to do but
there are
several ways to do it.  The way I have done it is to boot up one a second
drive and do the installation there, then re-boot under the orginial FC5
drive and mount the second drive and copy (cp -ax) to a file.img or your
partitions that you want to use.  you can also install to a partition on
your existing drive but sometimes they may overwrite your orginial
boot-loader.  Will provide some more detail links that will provide more
information but don''t have time right now..hope this helps a little
right
now.

On 6/2/06, Ian Kent <ikent@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> It appears that I can only build FC5 guests on my FC5 machine.
>
> Anyone have any pointers to documentation that can explain creating
> guests of another distribution, such as Rawhide, on my FC5 box?
>
> Ian
>
>
> --
> Fedora-xen mailing list
> Fedora-xen@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-xen
>

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 10:31 -0500, Tom Bishop wrote:
> Well in a hurry but you can install most any distribution you want, I
> have probably 5, suse, ubuntu, debian, the only one that I haven''t
is
> FreeBSD (on my to do list).  The distributions don''t make it as
easy
> to do but there are several ways to do it.  The way I have done it is
> to boot up one a second drive and do the installation there, then
> re-boot under the orginial FC5 drive and mount the second drive and
> copy (cp -ax) to a file.img or your partitions that you want to use.
> you can also install to a partition on your existing drive but
> sometimes they may overwrite your orginial boot-loader.  Will provide
> some more detail links that will provide more information but
don''t
> have time right now..hope this helps a little right now. 
So are we assuming the install to the other disk will use Grub (ie. will
the pygrub work here) or are you constructing a specific configuration?
> 
> On 6/2/06, Ian Kent <ikent@redhat.com> wrote:
>         
>         Hi all,
>         
>         It appears that I can only build FC5 guests on my FC5 machine.
>         
>         Anyone have any pointers to documentation that can explain
>         creating
>         guests of another distribution, such as Rawhide, on my FC5
>         box? 
>         
>         Ian
>         
>         
>         --
>         Fedora-xen mailing list
>         Fedora-xen@redhat.com
>         https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-xen
>

Hi,

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 23:22 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> It appears that I can only build FC5 guests on my FC5 machine.
> 
> Anyone have any pointers to documentation that can explain creating
> guests of another distribution, such as Rawhide, on my FC5 box?
Right now, rawhide is using a later version of Xen than FC5 (FC5 is
using the 3.0.2 stable Xen release, whereas rawhide is tracking upstream
Xen development).  You can run an earlier guest on a later
hypervisor/dom0, but not the other way around; so you can''t run a
rawhide guest on an FC5 xen0 kernel.

People have reported success running a rawhide kernel on FC5, and using
that to host a rawhide guest, though.

--Stephen

On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 12:20 +0100, Stephen C. Tweedie
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 23:22 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> 
> > It appears that I can only build FC5 guests on my FC5 machine.
> > 
> > Anyone have any pointers to documentation that can explain creating
> > guests of another distribution, such as Rawhide, on my FC5 box?
> 
> Right now, rawhide is using a later version of Xen than FC5 (FC5 is
> using the 3.0.2 stable Xen release, whereas rawhide is tracking upstream
> Xen development).  You can run an earlier guest on a later
> hypervisor/dom0, but not the other way around; so you can''t run a
> rawhide guest on an FC5 xen0 kernel.
Thanks. That''s the conclusion I arrived at from poking around.
> 
> People have reported success running a rawhide kernel on FC5, and using
> that to host a rawhide guest, though.
Tried this but unfortunately my Radeon based card has become a problem
again with the latest Rawhide kernel and I haven''t really got time
right
now to deal with it.

The other thing that this post begs is the question of how to get an FC4
guest running using the standard xenguest-install.py script since there
is no simple way to generate the initial ramdisk image needed (of course
there is a xenU kernel that could be used in the repo).

It puzzles me that we haven''t we put together a package that has a set
of such install pairs for our distributions that have included Xen
support? OK, maintenance of such a package in a fast moving development
area like this would be a pain.

Ian

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 11:40 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> The other thing that this post begs is the question of how to get an FC4
> guest running using the standard xenguest-install.py script since there
> is no simple way to generate the initial ramdisk image needed (of course
> there is a xenU kernel that could be used in the repo).
Either by manually creating a tree with yum install-groups, or by
running something like qemu to bootstrap the process.
> It puzzles me that we haven''t we put together a package that has a
set
> of such install pairs for our distributions that have included Xen
> support? OK, maintenance of such a package in a fast moving development
> area like this would be a pain.
Right, and FC4 with a non-FC4, xen-compatible kernel is not a
combination we want to support.  It''s sad, but FC4 is simply not
compatible with current Xen.

--Stephen

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 12:29 +0100, Stephen C. Tweedie
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 11:40 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> 
> > The other thing that this post begs is the question of how to get an
FC4
> > guest running using the standard xenguest-install.py script since
there
> > is no simple way to generate the initial ramdisk image needed (of
course
> > there is a xenU kernel that could be used in the repo).
> 
> Either by manually creating a tree with yum install-groups, or by
> running something like qemu to bootstrap the process.
Actually tried that as well. Qemu network didn''t work for me so I gave
up on that as well.

But in any case this is just an experiment to see how things fit
together, hence my possibly silly requirements. The object being "how
easy is it to setup an environment ''identical'' to one that my
customer
would be using". So that gives the requirement of using a standard
install process.

It''s not problem, Xen and the OS integration is not quite up to it yet.
I expect once the integration settles and the development is stable for
a bit longer things will improve.
> 
> > It puzzles me that we haven''t we put together a package that
has a set
> > of such install pairs for our distributions that have included Xen
> > support? OK, maintenance of such a package in a fast moving
development
> > area like this would be a pain.
> 
> Right, and FC4 with a non-FC4, xen-compatible kernel is not a
> combination we want to support.  It''s sad, but FC4 is simply not
> compatible with current Xen.
Yep.

Ian

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 20:57 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> It''s not problem, Xen and the OS integration is not quite up to it
yet.
> I expect once the integration settles and the development is stable for
> a bit longer things will improve.
It''s actually not bad.  But it wasn''t so good with FC4, nor
was the ABI
for guests frozen at the time of FC4.  So don''t let the bad experience
of FC4-on-FC5 put you off trying with FC5 and/or rawhide; in particular,
if you have problems with it, do let us known and/or file bugzillas.

Cheers,
 Stephen

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 14:08 +0100, Stephen C. Tweedie
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 20:57 +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> 
> > It''s not problem, Xen and the OS integration is not quite up
to it yet.
> > I expect once the integration settles and the development is stable
for
> > a bit longer things will improve.
> 
> It''s actually not bad.  But it wasn''t so good with FC4,
nor was the ABI
> for guests frozen at the time of FC4.  So don''t let the bad
experience
> of FC4-on-FC5 put you off trying with FC5 and/or rawhide; in particular,
> if you have problems with it, do let us known and/or file bugzillas.
Yep, someone else has logged a bz regarding the FC6 Radeon problem.
I''m watching and hoping.

Ian