Xen users - Jan 2008 - Xen over SuSE 10.3 - Can''t find drive to boot with...

Dear List-Colleagues:

I have been working on installing Xen on Suse 10.3 for some time now.  I am
green as grass - both a total newbie to Xen and a relative newbie to Linux (as
well as a total newbie to SuSE).

Currently, I am at the point that when I click on the Xen entry in my grub
loader I see Xen starting and running through much of its early setup. 
Eventually, however, it quits on "waiting for device" - that is to
say, when it needs to find its drive partition and root.  I have spent several
person-days on this and believe my problem is that I have no xenblk.  Indeed, I
note that I do not have xennet, either, on my brand new, newly setup machine.

I looked everywhere for these files, re-installed far too many times, looked all
over the net and have even downloaded a tar version from the Xen.org site and
tried that too - still no xenblk or xennet.

I believe that for my install they ought to reside at:

/lib/modules/2.6.18-xen_3.1.0/kernel/drivers/xen

Not there, of course! (all that resides there are the folders: pciback and
tpmback)

Needless to say when I run mkinitrd, it complains that it cannot deal with
xennet or xenblk dependencies - as it can find neither of these modules.

I am perplexed, thoroughly flummoxed and suspect I have, in my rank ignorance,
made a ''flat forehead error'' - something that is so obvious no
instructions include it - but what?

My question is thus:

a) what have I done wrong in my install?
b) how can I get xenblk and xennet onto my machine
c) are there any special steps I have to take once I have them or can I simply
run mkinitrd again and create a new initrd file?

I am really, truly desperate or I would not trouble this list with what is,
likely something simple, the problem is that I cannot find the answer on my
own...

Best and many thanks, in advance, to any who reply!

Pyrrhic

P.S.

My menu.lst entry reads:

title
    root(hd0,5)
    kernel /boot/xen-3.1.0.gz dom0_mem=262144
    module /boot/vnlinuz-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0
    root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ ... -part6 vga=0x314
    resume=dev/sda5 max_loop 12
    module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0.img

Note: root(hd0,5) boots just fine when it is SuSE.




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On Thursday 10 January 2008 06:25:28 pm Pyrrhic wrote:
> I looked everywhere for these files, re-installed far too many times,
> looked all over the net and have even downloaded a tar version from the
> Xen.org site and tried that too - still no xenblk or xennet.
Standard locations for the latest SuSE 10.3 xenpae kernel (substitute xen for 
xenpae if necessary for you):

find /lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae -name ''xen*''

/lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae/kernel/drivers/xen
/lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae/kernel/drivers/xen/netfront/xennet.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae/kernel/drivers/xen/blkfront/xenblk.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae/kernel/drivers/xen/xenbus
/lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae/kernel/drivers/xen/xenbus/xenbus_be.ko

My /boot/grub/menu.lst xen stanza:

title XEN -- openSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.22.13-0.3
    root (hd0,1)
    kernel /xen-pae.gz
    module /vmlinuz-2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae root=/dev/system/root vga=0x31a 
resume=/dev/system/swap showopts CPUFREQ=no
    module /initrd-2.6.22.13-0.3-xenpae

/etc/sysconfig/kernel should have a line that says:

# ramdisk that is created for unprivilegd Xen domains (domU); you may need
DOMU_INITRD_MODULES="xennet xenblk"

Not quite sure how they do it for dom0, but I never had any trouble with 
SuSE''s xenpae kernel & initrd.

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On Friday 11 January 2008 07:25:28 Pyrrhic wrote:
> Dear List-Colleagues:
>
> I have been working on installing Xen on Suse 10.3 for some time now.  I am
> green as grass - both a total newbie to Xen and a relative newbie to Linux
> (as well as a total newbie to SuSE).
>
> Currently, I am at the point that when I click on the Xen entry in my grub
> loader I see Xen starting and running through much of its early setup. 
> Eventually, however, it quits on "waiting for device" - that is
to say,
> when it needs to find its drive partition and root.  I have spent several
> person-days on this and believe my problem is that I have no xenblk. 
> Indeed, I note that I do not have xennet, either, on my brand new, newly
> setup machine.
I''m assuming it''s your Dom0 that is not booting correctly -
can you confirm
that? Typically, this should ''just work'' and as the Dom0 is
the privileged
domain it''s not using the xennet and xenblk drivers but actually uses
the
real hardware.
> I looked everywhere for these files, re-installed far too many times,
> looked all over the net and have even downloaded a tar version from the
> Xen.org site and tried that too - still no xenblk or xennet.
Using openSUSE 10.3 (especially for a newbie) you''re far better off
using the
version(s) of Xen that ship with the distribution rather than those available 
via tarballs at xensource.com or xen.org (although there''s no reason
why they
won''t work).
> I believe that for my install they ought to reside at:
>
> /lib/modules/2.6.18-xen_3.1.0/kernel/drivers/xen
>
> Not there, of course! (all that resides there are the folders: pciback and
> tpmback)
Can you confirm that you''ve got the Xen enabled kernel installed? This
should
have quite a few more sub-directories in this directory than the two you 
mention.
> Needless to say when I run mkinitrd, it complains that it cannot deal with
> xennet or xenblk dependencies - as it can find neither of these modules.
>
> I am perplexed, thoroughly flummoxed and suspect I have, in my rank
> ignorance, made a ''flat forehead error'' - something that
is so obvious no
> instructions include it - but what?
>
> My question is thus:
>
> a) what have I done wrong in my install?
> b) how can I get xenblk and xennet onto my machine
> c) are there any special steps I have to take once I have them or can I
> simply run mkinitrd again and create a new initrd file?
>
> I am really, truly desperate or I would not trouble this list with what is,
> likely something simple, the problem is that I cannot find the answer on my
> own...
>
> Best and many thanks, in advance, to any who reply!
>
> Pyrrhic
>
> P.S.
>
> My menu.lst entry reads:
>
> title
>     root(hd0,5)
>     kernel /boot/xen-3.1.0.gz dom0_mem=262144
>     module /boot/vnlinuz-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0
>     root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ ... -part6 vga=0x314
>     resume=dev/sda5 max_loop 12
>     module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0.img
>
> Note: root(hd0,5) boots just fine when it is SuSE.
This looks like some sort of custom set up, as the initrd normally
doesn''t
have the .img extension if it''s been installed from the distribution.
Your
also trying to boot a kernel called vnlinuz... is the n here just a typo?

My installation of openSUSE 10.3 is using a 2.6.22 kernel series - how come 
yours is on the older 2.6.18 series? (This looks suspiciously like a SLES 10 
kernel family - is that what you downloaded and installed from xen.org 
maybe?)

Jon

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