Re: [Xen-users] Bootable LiveDVD w/ Xen that boots Windows Image?

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

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Joshua
Kinard<joshua.kinard@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Fajar,
>
> Yup, read more about the qcow stuff after digging around on Google some. 
>  Even came across some of your messages on a thread or two about it.  I'll 
> probably give this a shot and see what happens, though I think I'm going to 
> try combining this with the UnionFS (aufs specifically) stuff.  I've read 
> that might work better, since I'll be able to keep the squashfs'ed WinXP 
> qcow2 image on the DVD itself and not have to offload it into RAM, but 
> somehow create a r/w qcow2 image in tmpfs, probably ntfs format it, and allow 
> aufs to overlay that somehow.  Although, I'm not sure in what order to do 
> that just yet.  Once I figure it out, scripting will be the easy part.

Am I right in assuming you want to use aufs on Windows? AFAIK it
doesn't run on Windows.

The other approach with aufs probaly won't work either. You CAN use
aufs to merge the squashfs content with ramdisk to create a "writable"
root fs for the dom0 (not for Windows), but the way aufs works when
there's a change in a file (e.g. the WInXP image file) it will copy
the WHOLE file to r/w location, and change it there. That would be
unusable as the image would be several GB in size.

So my best suggestion is you probably can use aufs for the live CD
part, but you can't use it for the domU image. You'd have to split it
into a base image which can be read only on DVD, and a qcow
incremental image (is this the right term?) which can be on RAM.

> As far as VirtualBox goes, I've played around with the OSE edition (that's 
> all Debian distributes in Lenny), and the problems with it are that A) It's a 
> bit aged (~1.6-something in Lenny), and B) I believe I need the Guest 
> Additions in order for WinXP to properly utilize the network driver presented 
> to it by the Vbox virtual layer, and that's not free.

Yeah, I forgot about the guest addition :)

BTW, what kind of WIndows application are you going to use? Some
applications (like Firefox, vnc, etc.) CAN be made to run on windows
"live" CD using BARTPE. If it works you'd save the overhead of dom0
and Xen. See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

-- 
Fajar

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