Re: [Xen-users] Upgrading fedora domUs

["Fajar A. Nugraha" <fajar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> Hello, all.  I know the real answer is to throw out the old systems :)
> but we have some old systems still running on Xen 2.0.7 with Fedora Core
> 3.  We have a need to upgrade some of these.  Xen was installed from
> source as we did need to customize the kernel.
>
> How does one do this? In fact, how does one upgrade domUs in general?
>
>   
As Mark mentioned, Fedora generally recommend against upgrading directly
using yum.

Having said that, I upgraded (using yum) FC2 -> RHEL4 and RHEL4 -> RHEL5
Xen dom-U, Xen 2, custom kernel, no initrd. In general, however, I'd say
don't bother. Unless you're familiar enough with the way Xen and
RHEL/Fedora boots (as in understand what each line in initrd and
rc.sysinit does), the "custom kernel" part is a no-go.

The "no initrd" part means I need to hack rc.sysinit to do some stuff
that would normally be done in intrd, like mounting tmpfs for /dev, and
creating some device nodes manually (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.).
Afterwards, I excluded initscripts on yum.conf to make sure my
modifications doesn't get overwritten by new packages. And then there's
also kernel compatibility problem : some RHEL5 packages (e.g. hald)
doesn't work with Xen 2's kernel 2.6.10 (the domU kernel, located on dom0).

In Xen3 and RHEL5, however, it should be much easier. The default setup
is that each domU boots its own kernel and initrd (not dom0's), so
upgrading each domU (e.g. RHEL5 -> FC7, if you feel like it) would be
the same as upgrading a physical box.

> In our test lab, I attempted to upgrade an FC3 domU to FC4 via yum.  The
> upgrade eventually succeeded but the domU now crashes on boot with these
> nasty messages:
>
>   
/lib/tls or initrd problem?

Regards,

Fajar

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