Progress update

["Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap@eros-os.org>]

Since I reported problems a while back, I wanted to pass along a
progress update.

I now have my laptop booting xen dom0 (mostly) successfully using the
stock RPMS in the Fedora development tree. I'll poke at xenU tonight.
Graphics and everything. This is running the "xen-2-20050522" RPM. The
"xm dmesg" output indicates that this is really Xen3-devel.


There are few issues that I have been unable to resolve:

1. Interrupt response time seems sluggish, particularly early on. This
may be related to item (2).

2. Boot-time network configuration isn't working. When Fedora goes to
bring up the eth0 interface, there is a long delay usually followed by
failure. If I'm bringing up the interface using DHCP, it fails 99.99% of
the time. If I bring up the interface with a static IP, It fails less
predictably. Not clear what is happening here.

Once the machine is up, I can down and re-up the interface successfully.
However, if I subsequently bring up xend, the xen bridging stuff gets
set up and the ethernet is disrupted. dmesg output from xen0 kernel:

Bridge firewalling registered
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
xen-br0: port 1(eth0) entering learning state
xen-br0: topology change detected, propagating
xen-br0: port 1(eth0) entering forwarding state
xen-br0: duplicate address detected!

>From this point on, nothing I do will bring the ethernet back.

3. If I boot into text mode, there is a nasty vertical refresh swim.
This is on an LCD, so there shouldn't be any hard decisions to make
here. Not sure what is up with that.

4. No evidence of ACPI support -- not sure if the patch has made it into
this RedHat RPM.

Ah well. Now to reboot so that this message can make it off the machine.


shap