Henning,
Thanks for responding! :)
Thanks for responding. I'll try to brief. Here is the quote from the 3.0
manual:
6.1 Exporting Physical Devices as VBDs
One of the simplest configurations is to directly export
individual partitions from domain
0 to other domains. To achieve this use the phy: specifer in your
domain
confguration file.
If DomU (the guest) had to be on the same "filesystem" (as you say) as
the host, then it wouldn't make sense to "export individual partitions
from domain 0 to other domains," because a partition *is* a file system
(at least once it has been formatted), and the exported file system is
certainly not the same as the one on which Dom0 is running! As the
language of section 6.1 suggests, running separate partitions as guest
domains is a standard or "simplest" usage scenario, and building a
filesystem inside a file mounted as a loopback device (as most people
seem to be doing at this stage) is arguably a secondary, advanced usage
in relation to the "simplest configuration" that I am trying to achieve
here. Now it so happens that the physical partition to be exported is
not pristine, but virginity is not a requirement here. Domain 0 doesn't
care whether or not DomU is also natively bootable or chain loaded or
whatever when run outside Xen, -- it just needs a kernel, a root
filesystem, and an initrd, and all that information is supplied in the
guest domain's configuration file (so no separate menu.lst or grub.conf
should be needed).
I have interleaved the remainder of my reply with the text of your
message below.
Henning Sprang wrote:
Hi,
On 8/18/06, nbitspoken <nbitspoken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
reproach:~ # cat /etc/xen/vm/rhas4 | grep "kernel ="
kernel =
"/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen3_86.1_rhel4.1"
reproach:~ # ls /mnt/hda7/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen3_86.1_rhel4.1
/mnt/hda7/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen3_86.1_rhel4.1
So the kernel you are trying to boot is in the domU system you want to
boot?
*It is on the partition, visible to dom0 as /dev/hda7, also to be
exported to domU as "hda7" (the choice of a device name for DomU is
arbitrary).*
I think you got something totally wrong - the kernel to boot the domU
has to be located in the dom0 filesystem!
*If this were so, then there would be no reason to put device names like
/dev/hda in the guest domain configuration file,
because as long as we stay in the file system, a system path name will
suffice, e.g., /home/henning/vmlinuz...
Neither Xen nor Linux imposes any location requirements on the kernal as
long as all the required devices are visible to
the bootloader. The only additional requirement imposed by Xen is that
the kernel and the initrd are on the same filesystem.*
BTW: your mail is very long and hard to understand, please read
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html which will help you
getting help and others toi understand you...
*I should not have included the initial part about my hardware -- that
was to prevent replies to the effect that I am not giving
enough information. On retrospect, I would agree that the first part was
superfluous overkill. In the second part, I grep the
relevant files to show that the paths are correct. If you don't do much
Unix, this might put you off. I also included a copy
of my config file, which lengthened the message considerably but
provided what I take to be essential information. *
