xen client installation question

xen client installation question

[Jun Koi]

Hi,

I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
any good idea to do that??

The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!

Thanks,
Jun

Re: xen client installation question

[Jean Guyader]

2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
> compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
> any good idea to do that??
>
> The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
> 4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!
>

Hi,

For xenclient we are using buildroot which is based on busybox + uclibc.
Because we use another libc we have to cross compiled environment, that why we
compile binutils and gcc.

If it doesn't work with ubuntu you can still create a debian chroot.

Thanks,

-- 
Jean Guyader

Re: xen client installation question

[Jun Koi]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean Guyader <jean.guyader@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
>> compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
>> any good idea to do that??
>>
>> The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
>> 4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> For xenclient we are using buildroot which is based on busybox + uclibc.
> Because we use another libc we have to cross compiled environment, that why we
> compile binutils and gcc.
>
> If it doesn't work with ubuntu you can still create a debian chroot.

Could you explain how to "create a debian chroot" to avoid my
compilation problem?

It is not hard to fix the bugs of binutils, but I want to avoid
messing with that if possible.

Thank you,
Jun

Re: xen client installation question

[Jun Koi]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean Guyader <jean.guyader@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
>> compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
>> any good idea to do that??
>>
>> The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
>> 4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> For xenclient we are using buildroot which is based on busybox + uclibc.
> Because we use another libc we have to cross compiled environment, that why we
> compile binutils and gcc.

And could you explain why we have to use buildroot, and what is the
benefit of using busybox+uclibc?

Thanks,
J

Re: xen client installation question

[Jean Guyader]

2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean Guyader <jean.guyader@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
>>> compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
>>> any good idea to do that??
>>>
>>> The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
>>> 4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!
>>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> For xenclient we are using buildroot which is based on busybox + uclibc.
>> Because we use another libc we have to cross compiled environment, that why we
>> compile binutils and gcc.
>>
>> If it doesn't work with ubuntu you can still create a debian chroot.
>
> Could you explain how to "create a debian chroot" to avoid my
> compilation problem?
>
> It is not hard to fix the bugs of binutils, but I want to avoid
> messing with that if possible.
>

You said the issue was coming from your gcc version.
I know that the build works under debian, that why it will help.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Guyader

Re: xen client installation question

[Jean Guyader]

2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean Guyader <jean.guyader@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/4/16 Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com>:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am trying to install XCI. To my horrified, it tries to download and
>>> compile a lot of softwares, like binutils and even gcc 4.2.4. Is there
>>> any good idea to do that??
>>>
>>> The problem is that binutils itself has some code not tested on gcc
>>> 4.3 on Ubuntu 8.10, and the compilation fails!
>>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> For xenclient we are using buildroot which is based on busybox + uclibc.
>> Because we use another libc we have to cross compiled environment, that why we
>> compile binutils and gcc.
>
> And could you explain why we have to use buildroot, and what is the
> benefit of using busybox+uclibc?
>

We wanted to have a very small and self contain dom0 (less than 30MB).
I only way to reach that was to use busybox and uclibc. There is also
newlib out there, but the buildroot project provide a build system
that we can use directly.

-- 
Jean Guyader

Re: xen client installation question

[Vincent Hanquez]

Jun Koi wrote:
> Could you explain how to "create a debian chroot" to avoid my
> compilation problem?
more generally, if you build environment doesn't work:

- you can use a debian lenny/squeeze VM to do your build.
- you can create a debian lenny/squeeze chroot. i suggest, if you don't 
know how already, to have a look at: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot
- send us patches to make our build system more friendly to other 
distributions. we certainly wish to have the system work everywhere 
(within reason), but lack some time to do that.

Cheers,
-- 
Vincent

Re: xen client installation question

[Vincent Hanquez]

Jun Koi wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jean Guyader <jean.guyader@gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>
> And could you explain why we have to use buildroot, and what is the
> benefit of using busybox+uclibc?
>   
as Jean was saying, this is mostly related to the size of the output. 
and also to be in a control environment in dom0, so we don't depend of 
different udev scripts or something like that.

also, using a proper build system, make the build system consistent 
across all users, and prevent to have random problems because
<random distributions> use <random software> of <random version> but we 
support only <other random version>.

Note that you should be able to compile most of the trees (kernel, 
toolstack, ...) by yourself on any distribution, if you install 
everything that's necessary.
but it won't be as easy and guaranteed to work as inside of our build.

-- 
Vincent

Re: xen client installation question

[Jun Koi]

Hi,

I temporarily switched to Ubuntu 5.01, and succesuflly built XCI.

The HOWTO instructs to install the rootfs, then reboot the machine.
But what is the next step after that?? I suppose that after that, we
can boot Xen from the newly created rootfs??


BTW, I found that in the below step in HOWTO:

....
4 - Copy the rootfs inside the root LV:
  $ bzip2 -d rootfs.i686.ext2.bz2
  $ dd if=rootfs.i686.ext2 of=/dev/xenclient/root
    (or alternately a remote push)
  $ dd if=rootfs.i686.ext2 | ssh root@target "dd of=/dev/xenclient/root"
....

The step "$ bzip2 -d rootfs.i686.ext2.bz2" not necessary, because we
already have rootfs.i686.ext2 inside binaries/xenclient/. So we can
remove that line.

Thanks,
J