Introduction and questions

Introduction and questions

[Bruce]

Hi, my name is Bruce. I have been using Linux for several years and toying 
with VMWare and looked at User Mode Linux. I discovered Xen a few days ago 
while reading a recent issue of Linux Weekly News. I installed Xen lastnight 
and joined this list att. I am currently running SuSE 9.1 Linux on a custom 
machine made my Monarch Computer with a Tyan motherboard, 2 Althon MP 2GHz 
processors, 1GB of RAM and three SCSI HDDs. From what I understand Xen cud be 
what I have been looking for.

I got the Xen 2.6.9 kernel booted with only two minor problems I have 
resolved. 
1. I did not understand the dom0_mem value and set too low. When I increased 
it, the kernel booted just fine.
2. my USB trackball would not work, but when I plug it into a PS/2 port, with 
works just fine. 

Now for my questions
1. Is "Domains" in Xen speak the same as Virtual Machines in VMWare speak?
2. I read that various OS's need to be ported to work with Xen, but I can't 
find out how or what needs to be done when reading the Xen manual. I have a 
9GB HDD ready to format and use for ported OSs.

TIA

Bruce   


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Re: Introduction and questions

[Jan Kundrát]

> Now for my questions
> 1. Is "Domains" in Xen speak the same as Virtual Machines in VMWare speak?

Yes, or has very similar meaning. At least I think so :-)
Domain0 is the same as the "host OS" in VMware, another domains are 
"guest OSes".

> 2. I read that various OS's need to be ported to work with Xen, but I can't 
> find out how or what needs to be done when reading the Xen manual. I have a 
> 9GB HDD ready to format and use for ported OSs.

"to port" means to rewrite portions of code of some program so it will 
run on, eg., another platform. "Porting xen" means rewriting some 
machine-dependent parts of OS' kernel code to work under xen. This is 
job for experienced programmers, not for you. Linux has been ported 
already :-), so you won't have to bother with it.

j.



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Re: Introduction and questions

[Mark Williamson]

> 2. my USB trackball would not work, but when I plug it into a PS/2 port,
> with works just fine.

You probably don't have USB support compiled in.  If you enable USB support 
your xen0 kernel, it should work fine.

> 1. Is "Domains" in Xen speak the same as Virtual Machines in VMWare speak?

Basically less.  Technically, we call a "virtual machine" the persistent 
entity with configuration, virtual disks, etc.  We call a *running* virtual 
machine a domain.  This is like the distinction between programs and 
processes that many OSs have.

> 2. I read that various OS's need to be ported to work with Xen, but I can't
> find out how or what needs to be done when reading the Xen manual. I have a
> 9GB HDD ready to format and use for ported OSs.

There's some guidelines on porting OSs in the interface manual.  Note however 
that only the operating system kernel needs modification - this has been done 
already for Linux 2.4 / 2.6, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Plan 9.

HTH,
Mark


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Re: Introduction and questions

[Dariusz Pietrzak]

> machine-dependent parts of OS' kernel code to work under xen. This is 
> job for experienced programmers, not for you. Linux has been ported 
 How do you know he's not an experienced programmer?

-- 
Dariush Pietrzak,
Key fingerprint = 40D0 9FFB 9939 7320 8294  05E0 BCC7 02C4 75CC 50D9


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Re: Introduction and questions

[Jan Kundrát]

Dariusz Pietrzak wrote:
>>machine-dependent parts of OS' kernel code to work under xen. This is 
>>job for experienced programmers, not for you. Linux has been ported 
> 
>  How do you know he's not an experienced programmer?
> 

from this sentence:
"2. I read that various OS's need to be ported to work with Xen, but I 
can't find out how or what needs to be done when reading the Xen manual. 
I have a 9GB HDD ready to format and use for ported OSs."
Experienced programmer would probably read the "Developer Manual" first 
:-). Well, it was a guess, but (according to private correspondation 
with original poster) true.

j.



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