Karmic/Lucid i386 virtual flavour

[Andy Whitcroft]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 10:44:17AM -0800, John Johansen wrote:

> > There has been some discussion about XEN not working with the 32bit kernels
> > in both Karmic and Lucid it seems that when we moved from having a server
> > flavour to having a generic-pae flavour in 32bit we moved from M686 to
> > M586 for that PAE based kernel.  XEN dom-U now does not work because
> > it is dependant on TSC support in the processor.  Note that the Jaunty
> > server flavour config was CONFIG_M686 which includes TSC automatically.
> > It does appear from Wikipedia that PAE support comes after TSC support in
> > the Pentium timeline and therefore we may well be able to enable TSC and
> > XEN by switching the generic-pae config over to CONFIG_M586TSC mode, as
> > to have PAE capabilities you must also have a TSC.  M586TSC is basically
> > just M586 (what we have now) plus TSC.
[...]
> Trying this again has been on my todo list, as I would love to kill the
> EC2 topic branch.  I will just note that this was what was initially tried
> with Karmic but ended up failing in 1 out of 4 zones on EC2.

I will note that we are not specifically looking to fix this for EC2,
but for any XEN use of any kind.  So even if it is not useful in the EC2
environment it has utility.

-apw