Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/4] Turn-key PV-GRUB2 installation

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2013-12-12 at 15:36 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> This patch set should make it easier to maintain PV-GRUB2 installations.
> The general idea is based on discussions I had with Xen developers
> (mainly Ian Jackson) at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May 2011; though
> I never did manage to get the core port done and Vladimir beat me to
> that, I think the configuration approach we discussed there is still
> valid and useful.
> 
> The idea here is that people maintaining dom0s, especially in big cloud
> installations, will probably not want to update their PV-GRUB2 image
> (which will be read from the dom0 filesystem but will run in the domU)
> very often; but on the other hand people maintaining distributions will
> want to be able to move on and make use of latest-and-greatest features.
> To make this work, we build a dom0-filesystem-suitable grub.xen image
> which just tries to chainload another grub.xen from a couple of
> reasonably standard locations in the domU's filesystem
> (/boot/grub/grub.xen and /boot/grub2/grub.xen).

This all sounds rather sensible. (actually, it sounds pretty awesome!)

A bit unrelated, and perhaps a bit far fetched, but I wonder if it might
be possible to chainload somehow from dom0's pvgrub1 to a pvgrub2 from
within the guest. I'm thinking of how long it might take cloud providers
to start providing pvgrub2 from their dom0s...

> 
> I've arranged that you can either use that very same grub.xen image in
> the domU by way of a new mechanism that passes GRUB environment
> variables via the Xen guest command line so that we can tell which
> context we're in, or you can run "grub-install --target=x86_64-xen" in
> the domU which will build and install a suitable one in more or less the
> usual way.
> 
> Colin Watson (4):
>   Add an option to exclude devices from search results.
>   Accept environment variables on the command line for Xen.
>   Build grub.xen.
>   Improve installation on Xen.
> 
>  .gitignore                       |  1 +
>  ChangeLog                        | 45 
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  Makefile.am                      | 14 +++++++++++++
>  configure.ac                     |  1 +
>  docs/grub.texi                   |  7 ++++++-
>  grub-core/Makefile.core.def      |  7 +++++++
>  grub-core/boot/xen/xen.cfg.in    | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  grub-core/commands/search.c      | 15 ++++++++++++--
>  grub-core/commands/search_wrap.c | 27 +++++++++++++++++++-----
>  grub-core/kern/xen/init.c        | 44 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  include/grub/search.h            |  9 +++++---
>  util/grub-install.c              | 11 ++++++++--
>  12 files changed, 199 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 grub-core/boot/xen/xen.cfg.in
> 



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