Hi All: I found this old message on the web archives. I've gotten Xen working with PXELinux, albeit with something of a hack. The basic chain is: 1. pxelinux 2. memdisk 3. FAT16 floppy image 4. grub installed on floppy image 5. xen.gz and vmlinuz on floppy image While this seems pretty simple, the key bits were to use: 1. FAT16 (not ext2, etc) for the floppy image 2. use the 'raw' flag when booting the floppy with memdisk I've documented the whole mess here: http://www.phlinux.com/?doc=7 Hope it helps someone... and thanks for the pxelinux tool, I use it on a daily basis! -Matt Bret Mckee wrote:> Greetings: > > [ First, apologies if this has been discussed before. I looked through > about the last year's worth of archives, but couldn't find a "Search > feature", so I used the visual grep method, which is not foolproof. I > also tried to download the full text of the archives to use the real > grep, but I got an error loading it... ] > > I'm working on setting up the Xen virtual machine system from > Cambridge to boot using PXE. Unfortunately, it requires 3 images to > be loaded (xen, linux, initrd) and I can't find any mention of doing > this with PXELINUX, and the only people I have found who have made it > work are using pxegrub (with kernel=, module=, initrd=). > Unfortunately, pxegrub doesn't support the NIC I have (I still don't > understand why it needs NIC drivers when PXE is available, but that is > a different issue :-)
Matt C wrote:> Hi All: > > I found this old message on the web archives. I've gotten Xen working > with PXELinux, albeit with something of a hack. The basic chain is: > > 1. pxelinux > 2. memdisk > 3. FAT16 floppy image > 4. grub installed on floppy image > 5. xen.gz and vmlinuz on floppy image > > While this seems pretty simple, the key bits were to use: > > 1. FAT16 (not ext2, etc) for the floppy image > 2. use the 'raw' flag when booting the floppy with memdisk > > I've documented the whole mess here: > http://www.phlinux.com/?doc=7 > > Hope it helps someone... and thanks for the pxelinux tool, I use it on a > daily basis! >FWIW, I'll be adding proper Xen support (probably via a com32 module) as soon as I can get me some hacking time. -hpa
H. Peter Anvin wrote:> Matt C wrote: >> I found this old message on the web archives. I've gotten Xen working >> with PXELinux, albeit with something of a hack. The basic chain is:I've had reports of success from people using the mbootpack program to package Xen and then booting the packaged image with PXElinux. http://www.tjd.phlegethon.org/software/#mbootpack It packages up Xen, xenlinux and an initrd and disguises them as a bzImage linux kernel, using a modified linux boot sector. You can supply Xen and xenlinux command lines at boot time. It's still a bit of a hack, though.> FWIW, I'll be adding proper Xen support (probably via a com32 module) as > soon as I can get me some hacking time.I was about to start working on Multiboot support for SYSLinux when I came across this. Would it be useful for me to do that or have you already got that under way? Tim. -- Tim Deegan (My opinions, not the University's) Systems Research Group University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory