Fedora xen - Jan 2008 - Fedora 8 DomU (i386) does not work on Fedora 8 (x86_64) host

Hi,

I''m using Xen since Fedora Core 6. My Dom0 runs the latest version of 
Fedora 8. Currently, I can install a Fedora 8 i386 DomU. The installation 
always hangs after formatting the virtual hard drive. The only message is 
"Please wait... This may take a few minutes" (from memory, translated
from
German). Unfortunately, this message appears not for some minutes but stays 
"forever" (at least 30 minutes).

My computer is reasonably fast (AMD X2) with plenty of RAM (4 GB). With 
Fedora 8 (x86_64) this messages is only visible for some seconds. There is 
no difference if I do install F8 i386 as HVM or PV domain.

One thing I noticed is that I did not manage to install Fedora 8 using QEMU.

Did anyone experience similar issues? I suspect, my local Fedora 
installation repository may be faulty although all packages are fine 
(checked with "rpm --checksig *") and I regenerated the repodata
multiple
times.

Any hints? Thank you very much.
fs

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 09:17:31PM +0100, Felix Schwarz
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I''m using Xen since Fedora Core 6. My Dom0 runs the latest version
of
> Fedora 8. Currently, I can install a Fedora 8 i386 DomU. The installation 
> always hangs after formatting the virtual hard drive. The only message is 
> "Please wait... This may take a few minutes" (from memory,
translated from
> German). Unfortunately, this message appears not for some minutes but stays
> "forever" (at least 30 minutes).
> 
> My computer is reasonably fast (AMD X2) with plenty of RAM (4 GB). With 
> Fedora 8 (x86_64) this messages is only visible for some seconds. There is 
> no difference if I do install F8 i386 as HVM or PV domain.
Running  paravirt  i386  domU on a x86_64 Dom0 is known to be rather
unreliable. The message you describe about install hanging during the 
formatting stage is definitely a symptom of running i386 domU on a
x86-64 dom0.  You ought to be able to mix- archs if you do HVM instead
though, so I''m rather surprised if you see the same problems with HVM
guests. 

Regards,
Dan.
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Daniel P. Berrange schrieb:
> Running  paravirt  i386  domU on a x86_64 Dom0 is known to be rather
> unreliable. The message you describe about install hanging during the 
> formatting stage is definitely a symptom of running i386 domU on a
> x86-64 dom0.  You ought to be able to mix- archs if you do HVM instead
> though, so I''m rather surprised if you see the same problems with
HVM
> guests. 
Yeah, I tried pv i386 just out of curiosity so I checked HVM/qemu quickly 
thereafter. I can even reproduce the problem (rebooted multiple times etc.).

My setup is quite boring: The DomUs use normal files as "disks" below 
/var/lib/xen/images with preallocated space (4 GB), they get 500 MB RAM for 
the initial install, packages are pulled from a HTTP repository server in 
my local network (shared eth0 bridging, using DHCP/ipv4 only). This setup 
worked/works for every Fedora version since Core 5 so I''m quite puzzled
how
to get further debug information...

fs

Felix Schwarz wrote:
> This setup worked/works for every Fedora version since Core 5 so
I''m
> quite puzzled how to get further debug information...
Just a short follow-up: It turned out that my repodata was invalid, my 
baseurl was wrong. After regenerating the repodata (again), everything 
worked fine :-)

fs