Xen project Mailing List

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Matthew Haas <haas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tom Horsley wrote:
> Is there a standard idiom most folks use to ask the
> question: Am I a linux that was just booted under Xen?
>
> I'm thinking about fooling with some of my alternate
> boot partitions so they can be booted as paravirt
> VMs, but they'd need to do a bit of reconfiguring
> of themselves when running under Xen early in the boot
> process (like not trying to mount other partitions
> that are gonna be used by other virtual machines
> and use a different host name, and don't start so many
> system services, etc).
>
> I suppose I could just check and see if the kernel
> name has "xen" in it, but I just wondered if there
> was one true way to ask this question.
>

This thread might be useful

http://xen.markmail.org/search/?q=Shell%20test%20for%20pv%20vs%20hvm#query:Shell%20test%20for%20pv%20vs%20hvm+page:1+mid:nqh2wxik3qqqyugp+state:results

In particular, Alex Williamson has a little script that seems to do the detection.

Regards,
Todd

This is actually a question I've also found myself asking... I've got
a couple custom-built Debian packages that unroll various configurations
onto VMs, dom0s, and regular machines... I find myself writing in all
sorts of weird checks to try and determine what it is (and always am
finding new loopholes that I need to close).

If there is a nice guaranteed way of detecting a Paravirtualized domU
(or if the machine is acting as a dom0), I would also be interested in
knowing (basing it off strings in the kernel name isn't necessarily 100%
guaranteed).

-Matthew
--
Matthew Haas
Visiting Instructor
Corning Community College
Computer & Information Science
http://lab46.corning-cc.edu/haas/home/

"Writing should be like breathing;
It is one of those important things we do." -- me

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Re: [Xen-users] Am I running under Xen?