Roadmap: Xen revisited

[Stefan Bader]

On 20.07.2011 00:29, Mark Goldfinch wrote:
> On 07/07/11 00:31, Chuck Short wrote:
>> I am the developer assigned to the specification, alot of the work has
>> already been done. We have the dom0 enabled in the kernel and have the
>> package synced from Debian. Right now we need more testing and opening
>> the bug reports. If you want to contact me off list that would be great
>> as well.
> 
> I have an oneiric domu install on a Debian 6 dom0.  My domu has a single /
> mount-point using ext4. The dom0 uses an lvm2 block device to present this disk
> to the domu.
> 
> Currently if I use pygrub and boot the oneiric 3.0.0-5 kernel my root filesystem
> gets remounted read-only:
> 
> [    9.077887] end_request: I/O error, dev xvda2, sector 8651288
> [    9.078258] end_request: I/O error, dev xvda2, sector 8651288
> [    9.078642] Aborting journal on device xvda2-8.
> [    9.101709] EXT4-fs error (device xvda2): ext4_journal_start_sb:296: Detected
> aborted journal
> [    9.101730] EXT4-fs (xvda2): Remounting filesystem read-only
> 
> Currently I work-around this by booting the 2.6.32-5-xen Debian 6.0 kernel, but
> that means I end up running up against
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/rsyslog/+bug/523610 which is
> less than ideal.
> 
> I note there is mention in the server team minutes saying Xen has several
> issues, but I can't seem to find this particular issue within Launchpad?
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark Goldfinch.
> 

The several issues rather being related to run the dom0. I still see some
warnings getting triggered which seem to be harmless enough. And HVM is not
working. There is another minor issue when you have sd* disk names in your pv
configuration (which is actually discouraged).

Otherwise I have PVM domUs working with our 3.0-rc7 based dom0. Not sure what
the Debian 6 dom0 is based on. The blkback was the one thing that went upstream
quite late. But since we had been following the 3.0 kernel, we would have picked
up any fixes there automatically.

-Stefan