[Xen-users] Fedora 18 dom0, no video?

[Ray Barnes <tical.net@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all.  I've got a situation with Fedora 18 on a dual Xeon E5506 box,
16GB RAM, Tyan S7002 motherboard with the latest BIOS.  Because of all
the issues, I'm starting to think maybe there's something wrong with
the box itself, maybe something strange going on with the BIOS or mobo
resources.  Although this box was in service without incident for
about 2 years prior.  I could not install Fedora 18 or 19, it would
get to the point in my kickstart install where it renamed eth0 to em1
and brought up the link w/ DHCP, then the video would lose signal
(confirmed both on my KVM and with a monitor directly attached).  Both
F18 and 19 did this.  It's important to note that my kickstart is a
"text" install method, I've also tried cmdline and it does the same.
I suppose it's possible that the installer wanted to switch to a
different VGA mode at that time, though F17 doesn't do that (at that
point, F17 would download the squashfs from the tftp server without
changing video modes).  I also specified a vga= to the kernel, to keep
it in 8-bit 640x480 but still no luck.  A "vnc" installation did
launch, and it went all the way through the installer until the end,
then threw some error which I don't recall at the moment.

So to get a working box, I ran the Fedora 17 kickstart as I would on
any other box, without incident, did a 'yum update' and then 'fedup'
to bring the box up to Fedora 18.  It booted fine, no issues.
Following the guide at
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Fedora_Host_Installation to enable Xen, as
I've done with countless other Fedora boxes, I installed Xen and setup
the bridge.  When I booted into Xen, it gets to the part where it
detects my USB keyboard/mouse (Dell 2161DS IPKVM with a single-USB SIP
attachment which carries the keyboard and mouse), then it stops
outputting additional lines, and about 10 seconds later, the video
goes black (but not a loss of signal).  I'm going to try to attach a
screenshot of the point at which it stops, hopefully it works through
the listserv.  Booting into the non-Xen option in grub2, produces a
working Fedora 18 environment with working video.

I'm not yet convinced that the Xen issue I just described is a problem
with the box itself.  I have another F18 box with the Fedora Xen
packages that works fine, including the video, it looks like this:

[root@reverse grub2]# rpm -q xen
xen-4.2.1-10.fc18.x86_64

grub2 boot configuration:

menuentry 'Fedora, with Xen hypervisor' --class fedora --class
gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen $menuentry_id_option
'xen-gnulinux-simple-781b00e4-5f5b-43fe-ba20-545bed174aa2' {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ext2
        set root='hd0,msdos2'
        if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
--hint-bios=hd0,msdos2 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos2
--hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos2 --hint='hd0,msdos2'
6243d00d-50ce-44fc-a0f3-49a843b64bbc
        else
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
6243d00d-50ce-44fc-a0f3-49a843b64bbc
        fi
        echo    'Loading Xen xen ...'
        multiboot       /xen.gz placeholder
        echo    'Loading Linux 3.8.7-201.fc18.x86_64 ...'
        module  /vmlinuz-3.8.7-201.fc18.x86_64 placeholder
root=/dev/sda5 ro rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0  rd.luks=0
vconsole.keymap=us rhgb quiet



And on the new, problematic F18 box:


[root@reverse ~]# rpm -q xen
xen-4.2.2-6.fc18.x86_64

grub configuration:


menuentry 'Fedora, with Xen hypervisor' --class fedora --class
gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen $menuentry_id_option
'xen-gnulinux-simple-a8ee5d7d-1603-4c37-86e4-93935105e229' {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ext2
        set root='hd0,msdos2'
        if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
--hint-bios=hd0,msdos2 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos2
--hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos2 --hint='hd0,msdos2'
5e9b3ecc-1013-475e-9115-8869373c5f99
        else
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
5e9b3ecc-1013-475e-9115-8869373c5f99
        fi
        echo    'Loading Xen xen ...'
        multiboot       /xen.gz placeholder
        echo    'Loading Linux 3.9.5-201.fc18.x86_64 ...'
        module  /vmlinuz-3.9.5-201.fc18.x86_64 placeholder
root=UUID=a8ee5d7d-1603-4c37-86e4-93935105e229 ro rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 console=tty0
KEYTABLE=us SYSFONT=True rd.luks=0 rd.dm=0
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
        module  /initramfs-3.9.5-201.fc18.x86_64.img
}

Now I've already tried removing the 'console=tty0' line in the kernel
parameters, no luck.  I also tried removing the console= and
specifying it like 'multiboot /xen.gz console=vga vga=ask,keep
placeholder' as is sometimes necessary, no luck.  Finally I made the
kernel parameters match the "good" box above, by removing the entire
part that says 'LANG=en_US.UTF-8 console=tty0 KEYTABLE=us
SYSFONT=True', no luck.  Finally, I removed those four items
'LANG=en_US.UTF-8 console=tty0 KEYTABLE=us SYSFONT=True' and did
'multiboot /xen.gz console=vga vga=ask,keep placeholder' with no luck
either.

Any idea what might be going wrong here?  Thanks in advance!

-Ray

Attachment: xen-f18-sshot.png
Description: PNG image

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