Re: [Xen-devel] [Noobie] SCSI Driver under VMWare

[Mark Williamson <Mark.Williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Disclaimer:  I'm entirely new to Xen, and am just testing it out for

Welcome :-)

> All that out of the way, I ran into a hitch while installing Xen
> (2.0.3) for the first time -- that being that it can't seemingly see
> my root partition.  The environment is VMWare 5 (Beta) for Windows and
> RHEL 4 (Beta; actually CentOS 4.0 Beta).  Xen seems like it started to
> work, but when it tried to mount the virtual SCSI drive (under virtual
> LSI SCSI card) it couldn't find it.
>
> I went into the kernel source (2.6.10) that the install script copied
> into the Xen source directory and per instructions went to add modular
> SCSI support for the virtual SCSI card.

If you're going to boot off it, you need to build support statically into the 
kernel.  Modular support won't do because without the driver it won't have 
anywhere to load the module from!  (unless you put the module into an initrd 
but that complicates things so I'm not going to describe that)

> Unfortunately I did not find 
> anything relevant under SCSI Low Level Drivers.  Curious, I looked at
> the same menu options under the 2.6.9 kernel source that comes with
> RHEL/CentOS, and there was a plethora of options.

Are you sure you were looking in the right place?

Try:
cd linux-2.6.10-xen0
make ARCH=xen menuconfig
<now go to Device Drivers/SCSI Device Support/SCSI Lowlevel Drivers and switch 
the option for your preferred device to y>
<now exit menuconfig, saving the configuration>
cp .config ../dist/install/boot/config-2.6.10-xen0
cd ..
make dist
make install

> I've read several folks discussing SCSI cards on this list, so I have
> to think that Xen can boot from a SCSI disk.  Is it the case that
> every device driver must be modified for use with Xen and the LSI
> driver just hasn't been modified yet?  Or did I screw up elsewhere?

Non-buggy Linux device drivers should work fine with Xen.  There are 
occasional cases of x86-centric driver writers taking liberties that need to 
be corrected but generally people don't have problems here.

HTH,
Mark

>
> TIA,
>
>     -Fred
>
>
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