Xen support without reinventing the wheel

[Eric S. Johansson]

'Forum Post wrote:
> fiy
> 
> Xen packages availible for Ubuntu and Debian
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/e2cuf

unfortunately, the unstable release is quite out of date and 2.0.7 has 
some problems that have been fixed in the current unstable.

Building it yourself kind of works.  I've been successful at building 
unstable out of mercurial.  Unfortunately, none of the instructions I've 
seen on building the domU environment work.  as I posted on the xen list:

---
root at xeno:~# xm create xm-xen0 -c
Using config file "/etc/xen/xm-xen0".
Error: Device 2049 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not 
working.

am trying to build a ubuntu domU.  I follow the instructions in the wiki 
( http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/UbuntuHoaryHowTo ) and I get this 
message about hot plug scripts not working.  The primary difference 
(from the instructions)is that I'm using xen unstable and the disks are 
all file based.

disk = [ 'file:/home/esj/xen,sda1,w',
          'file:/var/xen/swap/xen0,sda2,w' ]

one thing I noticed was that the constructed it did not have any of the 
kernel modules for domU so I copied them from the 
/usr/lib/modules/2.6.12.6-xenU directory on dom0

I suspect the real problem lies with the domU image production process.

---

so now I need to figure out how to debug a virtual machine startup when 
it won't start up.  :-) I swear if I figure out what I did wrong, I'm 
going to automate the image production process as much as possible. 
There's no excuse for doing things by hand if it's a known process.  If 
I wanted to do that, I would use Gentoo[1].

---eric

[1] part of the reason I was forced into making a system with xen 
unstable was that my older gentoo based xen system coughed up a bloody 
hairball after power failure.  Postmortem indicated a busted gentoo 
update (third in the past year) so it was ubuntu to the rescue with a 
new dom0.  interestingly, all of the gentoo based domU's just ran. 
There are some problems with kernel version changes but they're just 
running.  I really need to however to migrate them all to ubuntu virtual 
machines.