Fedora xen - Jun 2007 - Xen kernel missing drivers?

I have a Dell Optiplex 745, which is new enough that it uses the Intel 965
chipset and SATA optical drives.  Due to this newness, no Fedora versions
prior to 7 will even install on it.  I believe this is because of drivers
missing in Anaconda.

Anyway, Fedora 7 will install, but when I install the Xen rpms
(xen-3.1.0-0.rc7.1.rc7 and kernel-xen.2.6.20-2925.9.fc7) and try to reboot
using the xen kernel, the machine freezes.  It freezes shortly after a
series of timeouts and errors that look like this:

ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xef)
ata1.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4)
ata1.00: limiting speed to PIO0
failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
ata1.00: disabled
(repeat above series a few times)
ata2.00... (similar set of errors)
...
No volume groups found
VG_host not found

Why might the standard Fedora7 kernel work OK, but the Fedora7 xen kernel
not work?  Is it perhaps because of missing drivers in the xen kernel?

How can I fix this problem?  Do I need to give up on the xen rpms, and try
to compile xen from source, but using the Fedora7 kernel instead of a
vanilla Linux kernel?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Steve Brueckner, ATC-NY

Steve Brueckner wrote:
> Why might the standard Fedora7 kernel work OK, but the Fedora7 xen kernel
> not work?  Is it perhaps because of missing drivers in the xen kernel?
I can not say something specific regarding your hardware but I had a similar 
problem with Fedora 6 and a Dell Dimension system about 7 months ago. The 
problem was that the broadcom network chipset has some internal limitations 
regarding the memory address size it can address. At that time, Xen did not have
a workaround for this so the linux driver (b44) won''t work with a Xen
kernel
while working well with an standard kernel.

So in essence, it may be a combination of hardware limitations and/or Xen that 
your hardware does not work with Xen. Maybe incomplete Linux drivers. Searching 
bugzilla helped me at that time :-)

fs