Re: [Xen-users] Re: State of Xen in upstream Linux

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

Grant McWilliams wrote:
> Vbox OSE has full source available. I was working on a contract for a
> corporation and was in the stage
> of deciding which virtualization platform to run and installed Vbox in
> a Xen system (running Xen). The installer
> loaded the vbox driver (As well as set it up to load automatically)
> and sent the server into a continuous reboot. Unfortunately this was
> in a Datacenter that I had no physical access to. The Vbox developers
> jumped all over me when I suggested that it was a bug.
> When running Xen the VMware interface will come up and the driver will
> load but the VMs just don't start. It seems like
> that would be a much better situation than causing the entire machine
> to crash. Seems like a Vbox problem. It was run in Dom0.

Yes, that sounds like an inherently unstable configuration.  I don't
know anything about how VBox operates internally, but whatever pagetable
management scheme they're using will quite likely not work under Xen
without a lot of care.  The best we can do in that case is try to make
sure that VBox doesn't attempt to come up.

If they don't rely on VT/SVM, then it may work from within a Xen hvm
domain, but I don't know what benefit that would have.  What were you
trying to achieve by running VBox in dom0?

    J