[Xen-devel] Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

[Zir Blazer <zir_blazer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A year or so ago I had done a near identical guide in spanish, to make 
installing Xen more accessible to hispanic people. However, I figured out that 
pretty much everyone which was interesed in it, didn't had the proper Hardware 
to try Passthrough, and anyone who does, should have no issues understanding 
english in the first place, so my efforts weren't worth it. I didn't initially 
thought of doing it in english since there were already some quite complete 
guides, but they were for other Linux distros, and at this point, they're a bit 
dated, so I missed most of the possible spotlight for not choosing the correct 
language:

Dizzy guide for Fedora: 
http://www.overclock.net/t/1205216/guide-create-a-gaming-virtual-machine/
powerhouse guide for Linux Mint: 
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=112013
Teo En Ming guide for Ubuntu: Somewhere at xen-users
I think I forgot another one.

Zir Blazer's "Me too" guide for Arch Linux: http://pastebin.com/rzqw6Vfa

Part of the idea is to not make a guide that is "install this, do that", but 
something that you can learn criteria from. So the end result is that my guide 
is totally biased, well, on how I do things.

What to expect:

- It is a 135 KiB wall of text, approaching binary blob complexity. In order to 
understand it, you may need to reverse engineer it.
- It is totally biased on my criteria and usage style.
- It is politically incorrect, since I'm sitting on the root user all the day 
and most Linux users seems to not like that. But if you follow my guide, you 
will do it, too!
- It may be factually incorrect, since there are a few things which I may have 
explained wrong
- It is incomplete, since there are some things that I still didn't learned how 
to do, so I can't explain. An example is a lot of Openbox related config
- It is inconsistent, since some things I explain as detailed as I can, while I 
skip doing so totally in other areas
- It is in engrish, since I didn't did a slowly paced read to figure out that 
all the syntaxis and verbs are correct. Try to look around for memetizable "All 
your base belong to us" phrases.
- I rushed it to completion, since I wanted to publish it ASAP and get some 
feedback to see if it is worth continuing it or not. You can notice it near the 
end.
- It doesn't includes any Passthrough instructions at all!

The guide at the current stage is a sort of rollercoaster, but if you follow it 
carefully, will take you in a walkthrough style from an empty Hard Disk to a 
functional Arch Linux Dom0 with Xen 4.5 installed, with two simple exercises at 
the end that includes creating VMs with no storage to see that SeaBIOS and OVMF 
boots. There are also some mention on how to create a VM to test a nested Xen, 
so you can try my guide in a Xen VM (Which is what I did to make sure it works).

TO DO:

- Make it more consistent and easily readable. Could be useful to try to 
migrate it to a Wiki with screenshots.
- I missed everything related to SPICE. The qxl VGA driver should be extremely 
useful. Also, I don't use VNC at all, just SDL. So it is lacking in remote 
management.
- Adding Passthrough instructions (Is not that checking the PCI Address of a 
device with lspci, adding a line for xen-pciback in the Boot Loader config 
file, and adding the pci line in the DomU config file is THAT hard if you 
survived to the end)
- Adding instructions to enable Xen debug, since as the Arch Linux install I 
use is quite minimal, it makes for an excellent debug platform for Passthrough, 
as you have less variables. I expect that I can make out of this guide an 
standarized procedure to make a setup to get logs from in case of regressions.


                                          
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