xl vs. xm, possible bug in xl

["Sven Köhler" <sven.koehler@gmail.com>]

Hi,

xl is supposed to superseed xm, is this correct? How mature is xl,
actually? I'm asking, because the maintainers of the gentoo's xen
packages are migrating the init.d-scripts from xm to xl, but xl is
causing a lot of trouble.

Well, xl basically fails to start domains on my system.
> # xl create /etc/xen/xen-sk1
> Parsing config file /etc/xen/xen-sk1
> libxl: error: libxl.c:2145:libxl_set_memory_target new target 0 for dom0 is below the minimum threshold
> libxl: error: libxl.c:2145:libxl_set_memory_target new target 0 for dom0 is below the minimum threshold
> libxl: error: libxl.c:2145:libxl_set_memory_target new target 0 for dom0 is below the minimum threshold
> failed to free memory for the domain

Consider, that autobaloon=1 in xl.conf.
With the autobaloon=0 the errors change to

> # xl create /etc/xen/xen-sk1
> Parsing config file /etc/xen/xen-sk1
> libxl: error: libxl_device.c:476:libxl__wait_for_device_model Device Model not ready
> xl: fatal error: libxl_create.c:535, rc=-1: libxl__confirm_device_model_startup


Note, that I use dom0_mem=512M in grub.conf. Also, xm top states, that
there are 2139432k free memory. Considering the first issue, it seems
like xl is trying to baloon memory away from dom0, which fails - which
seems obvious wrong considering that I use dom0_mem. CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON
is enabled for dom0

The second issue sounds more severe, and I'm pretty clueless.

Is this a bug in xl?
Starting the very same domain with xm works without a hassle.


dom0:
vanilla 3.0.0 with vga patch
xen 4.1.1

domU config:
kernel = "/usr/src/linux-domU/_domU/vmlinux"
memory = 2048
vcpus = 8

root = "/dev/xvda1"
extra = "ro"

disk = [
	"phy:/dev/md2,xvda1,w",
	"phy:/dev/md5,xvda2,w",
]
vif = [
	"bridge=xenbr0,mac=00:16:3E:00:00:01",
	"bridge=xenbr1,mac=00:16:3E:00:01:01",
]