Karmic/Lucid i386 virtual flavour

[John Johansen]

Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> 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.
> 
Right, I'm not opposed to doing this at all, just a data point and I wanted to
check any unrealistic this might have give rise to with regards to the EC2
topic branch.