Re: Help booting Xen under RHEL6 beta2

["Pasi Kärkkäinen" <pasik@iki.fi>]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 03:16:23PM -0700, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> With RHEL6 beta 2 now available, I am once again trying
> to get a fresh Xen 4.0-testing tree booted "underneath" it.
> (This is for my Xen development machines, no political
> comments please ;-)  I'm sure there are some similarities
> between this process and the process under FC13(?);
> any help appreciated.
> 
> I have cloned xen-4.0-testing.hg and successfully built
> a full set of Xen "stuff" with "make world".  The dom0
> kernel that is installed in /boot is vmlinuz-2.6.31.13
> I used the default config (and default responses to
> the "make oldconfig" that seems to be run by default)
> to build this dom0 kernel.
> 
> 1) Is there a better config file to start from for
>    building the dom0 kernel?  For example, I see that
>    CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED{,V2} are not set, and I
>    am fairly confident that this kernel will not boot
>    a RHEL6 environment without it.

You could try my .config .. it works on Fedora 13 for me, with xen/stable-2.6.32.x dom0 kernel:
http://pasik.reaktio.net/xen/pv_ops-dom0-debug/config-2.6.32.15-pvops-dom0-xen-stable-x86_64

> 2) What do I use to build the initrd?  The standard
>    "mkinitrd initrd.img version" yields LOTS of error
>    messages and, in any case, I believe that dracut
>    should now be used instead of mkinitrd?

Yeah, you should use dracut instead of mkinitrd.
The usage is the same.

> 3) Should I be using a different/newer pvops kernel?
>    IIRC, there is an issue with booting >=2.6.32
>    pvops dom0 with pre-xen-unstable hypervisors? Or
>    is that fixed in latest xen-4.0-testing?
>

Xen 4.0.1-rc3 and newer work OK with the latest xen/stable-2.6.32.x
at least for me on F13.

> 4) Anything else I should watch out for?  E.g. recent
>    tool changes due to udev or xencommon or ???
>

Not sure..
 
> Most of these final steps are black magic to me and
> I've been using a recipe on RHEL5uX for them for
> so long, I'm not even sure what to look for if
> (when) the dom0 boot fails... and trial and error
> is not very productive for this kind of thing.
> 

I was thinking of posting a tutorial about Xen 4 + F13,
and after that try RHEL6 myself.. :)

-- Pasi