Re: [Xen-users] Can't boot into xen

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

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Robert Miesen <robert.miesen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yes, the normal, non-xen kernels all work just fine.
>
> I can now see why you are recommending RHEL / Centros 5.4 (I'm assuming
> Fedora core would work too).

Not really :D
Fedora dom0 support ended a long time ago (F8, I think, which is now
EOL) and support for newer dom0 kernels in Fedora is still considered
experimental.

Two Linux distros that I know of with Xen dom0 support are RHEL/Centos
and Suse/Opensuse.

> In that case, what purpose does a GNU/Linux
> installation serve for dom0? Does a dom0 instance just need a xen kernel of
> some sort or does the dom0 instance act more like a "normal" GNU/Linux
> distribution installation?

Here's some oversimplification:

Xen, the hypervisor, manage CPU and memory allocation between all
running domains.

dom0 provides I/O access (disk, network, etc.) for itself and other
running domUs. It consists of kernel with xen dom0 support (xenified
or pv_ops), and the normal libraries and programs that comes with
standard installation. It behaves mostly like a normal installation,
with the main difference that it doesn't have access to all CPU and
memory. dom0 can be Linux, Opensolaris, or *BSD.

xen userland tools (e.g. xm) basically controls the hypervisor and
dom0, telling it stuff like "you need to provide this much resource to
this domain"

A functional Xen installation needs all three components.

>
> Since I'm so new to xen, could you also give me a recommended partition
> setup for a system that will run virtualized instances of both Windows XP
> and Debian GNU/Linux? Are there any other resources you would recommend I
> look into?

For normal uses, any partition setup would do just fine. If you want
high disk I/O performance though, you should use LVM setup, leaving
some unused space for domU storage.

-- 
Fajar

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