I currently have the following environments on my laptop: . Windows Vista¹ . Debian ‘lenny’ . Debian ’squeeze’ . Ubuntu 10.10 Considering that the way they are set up, I never use more than 10-15% of the 4G of RAM that came with this laptop. I thought it might be worth trying to install a Xen dom0 on a separate partition and migrate the above environments to four virtual machines. The first problem I have run into is that I have not been able to boot the debian-based dom0 that I installed on a separate partition into anything other than the basic VGA console, with a blurry font and letters as big as houses, something that makes it very difficult to investigate a problem when for any reason X is not available. As soon as I switch from the default squeeze default kernel install to the squeeze Xen AMD64 kernel, boot command tweaks such as ‘vga=893’ or ‘video=uvesafb:1920x1200’ are ignored, making me think that this particular kernel cannot switch to a framebuffer console. Is this a limitation of Xen kernels, or is it specific to the Xen AMD64 kernel that ships with debian squeeze? The second problem is that when I start X on the dom0, the desktop comes up with a 1600x1200 resolution, which is incorrect in terms of aspect ratio (4:3 rather than 16:9) and of course the fonts in GUI applications and terminals alike are blurred and barely legible. I noticed in the Xorg log that rather than the nividia ‘nouveau’ driver, which is the default with debian squeeze, the X server falls back to the VESA driver when I boot the Xen kernel, and that the xrandr command indeed lists 1600x1200 as the highest resolution. On the other hand, ‘hwinfo --vbe | grep Mode’ correctly lists the 1920x1200 mode. Here again, and despite about a week of googling for answers, I have not been able to determine whether I am running into Xen kernel limitations or if this is due to the configuration of the Xen squeeze AMD64 kernel. If I had, I would have downloaded a source Xen kernel and compiled it myself. A third problem that I have not even been able to actively research since I am stuck with the dom0 problems described above and have yet to set up my virtual machines, is that when I use the Xen 2.0 LiveCD, I am seeing horrendous performance on the desktop-type demo machines. Naturally part of the problem would be due to my running the Xen environment off of a LiveCD, but that should not affect such matters as moving the pointer around the screen..?? I still have fond memories of Vmware Workstation 3.0, that I used long ago on a laptop whose hardware was something like an order of magnitude less powerful than my current machine: I was able to run my linux host on VT7, and two guests on VT8 and VT9, and provided I didn''t start any CPU-intensive tasks on any of the VM''s, all three worked quite nicely, almost as if they were the sole environment running on top of my hardware. Naturally, I do not claim having thoroughly investigated these aspects but before I invest yet more time, I thought I should make sure that what I am trying to achieve is at all possible in the first place. After all, since these are desktop environments, and though they do use quite a bit of RAM, only one of them will be active at any point in time: I only have two hands and one pair of eyes. In terms of performance, I thought that the overhead caused by my idle desktops whould be negligible. Is Xen the right tool for desktop virtualization or should I look elsewhere? Thanks, cj ¹ Only kept while the laptop is under warranty, in the event I need some common ground to work with the manufacturer''s tech support. _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
Henrik Langos
2011-Feb-14 10:50 UTC
Re: [Xen-users] I Xen ready for desktop virtualization?
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 01:24:28PM -0500, Chris Jones wrote:> I currently have the following environments on my laptop: > > . Windows Vista¹ > . Debian ‘lenny’ > . Debian ’squeeze’ > . Ubuntu 10.10 > > Considering that the way they are set up, I never use more than 10-15% > of the 4G of RAM that came with this laptop. I thought it might be worth > trying to install a Xen dom0 on a separate partition and migrate the > above environments to four virtual machines....> Is Xen the right tool for desktop virtualization or should I look > elsewhere?Even if I run the risk of being called a traitor ;-) I''d suggest you take a look at VirtualBox. It is open source and will come much closer handling-wise to what you are used from vmware.> ¹ Only kept while the laptop is under warranty, in the event I need some > common ground to work with the manufacturer''s tech support.That probably means you will have to run Vista on bare metal. Otherwise the support/diag tools will be of little use. cheers -henrik _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users