Xen devel - Aug 2012 - Unable to configure GRUB to boto xen 4.2 Kernel

I''ve just built and installed xen 4.2 -rc1 (72160635df2c) (from
/usr/local/xen-rc-4.2/), which seemed to go fine, along with all
dependencies listed in readme (on a clean debian-squeeze base). After a few
days of head bashing I can''t configure  grub to boot into the xen
kernel.

 

Initially I was getting a whole load of python errors as xen installed into
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages and sys.path was only referencing
/usr/bin/python2.6/dist-packages. I corrected that by adding a xenPaths.pth
file pointing at site-packages.

 

  xm list now produces (which I assume is because I''m not in the xen
kernel):

 

   Error: Unable to connect to xend: No such file or directory. Is xend
running?

 

I have the following entries in the boot directory

 

    ls /boot

    config-2.6.32-5-amd64                 initrd.img-xen-4.2
System.map-2.6.32-5-amd64                xen-4.2.gz  xen-syms-4.2.0-rc1

    grub                                     initrd.img-xen-4.2.0
vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64              xen-4.gz

    initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64  initrd.img-xen-4.2.0-rc1  xen-4.2.0-rc1.gz
xen.gz

 

ls /etc/grub.d shows:

 

    ls /etc/grub.d

    00_header  05_debian_theme  08_linux_xen  10_linux  30_os-prober
40_custom  41_custom README

 

when I try update-grub as root I get the following output:

 

    root@mcd40:/etc/grub.d# update-grub

    Generating grub.cfg ...

    Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png

    dpkg: version ''/boot/xen.gz'' has bad syntax: invalid
character in
version number

    dpkg: version ''/boot/xen.gz'' has bad syntax: invalid
character in
version number

    dpkg: version ''/boot/xen.gz'' has bad syntax: invalid
character in
version number

    dpkg: version ''/boot/xen.gz'' has bad syntax: invalid
character in
version number

    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64

    Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64

    done

 

Someone else seems to have a similar problem
here(http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2011-12/msg00074.html),
but I don''t quite understand what the proposed solution suggests.

 

If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be appreciated.

 

Marc

SP Group, Dept of Physics,

Cambridge University 



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On Sun, 2012-08-05 at 13:47 +0100, M. Fletcher wrote:
>     dpkg: version ''/boot/xen.gz'' has bad syntax: invalid
character in
> version number
update-grub wants to parse the filename to figure out the version (to
use in the menu entry), obviously this entry confuses it (I think this
is a grub bug, it would be useful if you would report this upstream).

As a work around you should be able to just remove /boot/xen.gz, it is
normally a symlink to a name containing a more fully qualified version.
In fact you could probably remove all the symlinks.

Ian.