Re: [Xen-users] Dom0 crash on hvm creation

[Brendan Wood <bwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hi Brendan,
> 
> CentOS 5.1 is available now, bundling a Xen derived from 3.1.  Are you able 
> to 
> try this and see if it solves your problem?  The HVM support in 3.1 is much 
> improved from 3.0.3 (as evidenced by Redhat now talking about Windows guests, 
> IIRC).
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark

I tested the version of Xen released with CentOS, and it doesn't seem to 
fix all the issues. While the original freezing problem seems to have been 
solved with a new BIOS provided by our server manufacturer, the 
xen-3.0.3-41 package (which is apparently supposed to be Xen 3.1, while 
xen-3.0.3-25 was still Xen 3.0. Good old Redhat) didn't fix other issues 
I'd noticed. Particularly, I noticed that it was still only seeing 3535M of 
RAM, when the servers had 4G or 8G altogether. Apparently it's more of a 
bug in grub than in Xen itself, but the Xen 3.1.2 release I used to build 
my RPM seems to have solved that.

I did notice that while Xen 3.1.2 did solve an issue we were having with 
the hvm hardware clock running fast, to the point where it was two weeks 
ahead at least, the clocks are still a couple of seconds out of sync with 
each other on different domU instances. This can be corrected with ntpd to 
the point that it doesn't cause an issue, at least. I wasn't able to test 
whether the Redhat release solved this issue as the one test server to 
which I was able to apply the CentOS 5.1 updates inexplicably didn't know 
any time problems to begin with, despite being the same configuration and 
BIOS version as other servers that exhibited the problem. Go figure.

Anyway, I just wanted to post my experiences so far. Xen 3.1 is absolutely 
required for 64-bit HVM from what I've seen, and Xen 3.1.2 seems to run a 
lot better than the prepackaged versions. 

Thanks for the help,

Brendan Wood

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