Xen in SuSE Pro 9.3

Xen in SuSE Pro 9.3

[Mark Williamson]

According to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/preview/, the 
latest SuSE includes Xen packages.

To what degree is this supported yet?  Is there a Yast module (as for UML) 
yet, or is it just the RPMs?  Of course, Yast can still do an install into a 
subtree to make a domain filesystem, so it's not that big an issue.

Perhaps I should upgrade :-)

Cheers,
Mark



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Re: Xen in SuSE Pro 9.3

[Gerd Knorr]

Mark Williamson <maw48@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> To what degree is this supported yet?  Is there a Yast module (as for UML) 
> yet, or is it just the RPMs?  Of course, Yast can still do an install into a 
> subtree to make a domain filesystem, so it's not that big an issue.

As far I know just the packages.  Also the "install into a subtree"
module got some tweaks for xen, don't know the details though.

  Gerd

-- 
#define printk(args...) fprintf(stderr, ## args)


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Re: Xen in SuSE Pro 9.3

[Kurt Garloff]

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Hi,

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 08:55:07PM +0000, Mark Williamson wrote:
> According to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/preview/, the 
> latest SuSE includes Xen packages.
  ^^^^^^
  upcoming

> To what degree is this supported yet?

For the SUSE Linux Professional products there's installation support,
which includes phone and email support to get a standard machine up
and running with Linux and the standard HW components working.
Xen is not covered by installation support.

When SUSE Linux Professional customers report issues we try to address 
them as our time allows and where we are interested.

Real support is only provided for the enterprise products, where we
have offerings with guaranteed response times etc. 
So from this perspective, the whole SUSE Linux Professional product
is "unsupported", where we can not make any such promises.

> Is there a Yast module (as for UML) yet, 

Currently there is
a) Installation into directory
b) bootloader config support

> or is it just the RPMs?  

The RPMs include some "how to get started" docu and a script to quickly
set up an unprivileged domain for testing.
I don't know how far Gerd got around to test the uml-utilities for
setting up domains and networking.

> Of course, Yast can still do an install into a 
> subtree to make a domain filesystem, so it's not that big an issue.

This would be the most tedious work many users.

> Perhaps I should upgrade :-)

You'll have to wait a few more weeks until the product is out,
unfortunately. Until then, I hope you'll test my RPMs for 
SUSE Linux 9.2 :-)
http://www.suse.de/~garloff/linux/xen/
I update them regularly. A xen-2.0.5 will be there later today,
the 2.0-testing which is there at the moment is from last tuesday.

Regards,
-- 
Kurt Garloff                   <kurt@garloff.de>             [Koeln, DE]
Physics:Plasma modeling <garloff@plasimo.phys.tue.nl> [TU Eindhoven, NL]
Linux: SUSE Labs (Director)    <garloff@suse.de>            [Novell Inc]

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Re: Xen in SuSE Pro 9.3

[Robbie Dinn]

Mark Williamson wrote:
> According to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/preview/, the 
> latest SuSE includes Xen packages.
> 

> To what degree is this supported yet?  Is there a Yast module (as for UML) 
> yet, or is it just the RPMs?  

I had difficulty finding the sources. I eventually found them here:

  ftp://ftp.suse.com/projects/kernel/kotd/i386/HEAD/kernel-source.src.rpm

but I would advise using a mirror instead. I don't think SuSE
like having all their bandwidth eaten up, plus you get better bandwidth
from the mirror. This one worked for me:
 
http://mirrors.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/projects/kernel/kotd/i386/HEAD/kernel-source.src.rpm

I don't know about any Yast module, but I haven't missed having one.

> Of course, Yast can still do an install into a 
> subtree to make a domain filesystem, so it's not that big an issue.

I haven't used the Yast UML 'install into a subtree' tool recently.
It may have improved since I last used it, but I found some things
needed patching by hand after the install (many months ago).

To install n machine images, I did n ordinary installs booting from
the install media, each install into it's own logical volume.
It's slow and it's dumb but it works. This also let me install a
Fedora core3 image along side the SuSE images. Of course this
method doesn't work on a live xen machine.

SuSE won't let you install into a root filesystem into a logical
volume unless you have a seperate boot partition. I set aside two
partions, one to act as a boot partition and one to act as a scratch
pad or fake /boot filesystem when installing the domU images. I tar'ed
the fake boot filesytem and untar'ed it back onto the root image after
each install.

> Perhaps I should upgrade :-)
> 

It's worth using the SuSE rpm's if you want a SuSE box
because it is what you are familiar with _and_ you want
a kernel that is as close as possible to what SuSE currently
ship/support. That was my reason anyhow.

Otherwise you could just use your favorite distribution.
Fedora core3 is pretty painless.

I am gratefull that SuSE are putting this stuff out for people
to try and I am looking forward to the next release.


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