Re: [Xen-devel] Uniform commands for booting xen

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

On Thu, 2015-11-12 at 08:44 -0700, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > > > On 12.11.15 at 14:41, <phcoder@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello, all. I'd like to have set of commands that would boot xen on all
> > platforms. I thought of following set:
> > 
> > xen_hypervisor FILE XEN_OPTIONS
> > xen_kernel FILE KERNEL_OPTIONS
> > xen_initrd INITRD INITRD INITRD
> > all initrds are concatenated.
> > xen_xsm ???
> 
> xen_ucode (and we might add more going forward). I don't see
> why the multiboot mechanism (kernel plus any number of modules)
> can't be used, without adding any Xen-specific directives.

You likely aren't aware that on ARM Xen doesn't boot via multiboot, but via
a protocol which involves passing modules in an fdt[0].

I had originally hoped that this would use the same command names in the
grub cfg, such that things would just work, however the grub maintainers
didn't like that (and I appreciate why).

Hence on grub/ARM we already have xen_{hypervisor,kernel,initrd,...}.

The question then is what grub-mkconfig (or more precisely
/etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen) ought to emit so that things just work on all
architectures.

The author of the grub/ARM/Xen patches initially made it generate the xen_*
namas for arm and the multiboot names for x86, here is Vladimir's feedback
on that: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2015-10/msg00133.html

Which I think gets us to approximately today and Vladimir's question.

Ian.

[0] http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions/Multiboot

> 
> Jan
> 
> > On arm64 it would use the arm64 xen FDT protocol but on x86 should we
> > use multiboot2 if multiboot2 header is present and multiboot otherwise?
> > Or do xen devs have other preferences?
> 
> 
> 
> 
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