Sunday, September 23, 2007

Debian Sarge from VMWare to Xen DomU

Now I have a good Gentoo Xen instance, I want to migrate my VMWare environments to Xen DomU's.

My mobo is the Via Epia EN12000 with a Via C7 Esther CPU, and only has the cmov CPU flag, so no chance of getting HVN working. I had to build the standard Gentoo Xen Linux Sources at version 2.6.20. That's better than the stock Xen Kernel which is currently 2.6.18, but it still doesn't have specific support for the Via C7. Not a problem though.

I have an old Debian Sarge that hasn't been updated in a while. To get it working I had to add the sarge-backports source to /etc/apt/sources.list. Once that was done it was still a bit of a problem getting a Xen kernel installed. In the end I figured out the dependencies to work.

Aptitude didn't give very helpful details so I had to get the info I needed by using "dpkg -i" on packages. Eventually the following commands got me where I wanted to get:

aptitude install klibc-utils
aptitude -V -f install udev=0.105-4~bpo.1
aptitude -V -f install initramfs-tools
aptitude -V -f install linux-image-2.6-xen-686


The key to this seems to have been the packages removed and installed by klibc-utils. After that you could probably skip to installing linux-image-2.6-xen-686.

For reference, the main error from aptitude that was killing me was:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
initramfs-tools: Depends: udev (>= 0.086-1) but it is not installable


even though udev-0.105-4~bpo.1 was installed.

Once the kernels were installed I tried to boot the domain in Xen and faced another problem. The linux-image-2.6.18-4-xen-686 in Sarge Backports now supports PAE, so I had to rebuild my dom0 kernel and apps-emulation/xen with PAE support.

2 comments:

jinnko said...

Update: Although this initially worked, the whole box would freeze randomly.

The freezes are a separate problem that is a known issue with these VIA motherboards. There are various discussions on workarounds, though nothing has proven to be conclusive yet. When that is resolved on the core standard system I will come back to Xen virtualization again.

jinnko said...

While updating from Ubuntu Edgy Server to Ubuntu Gutsy I had the same problem. In that scenario I just executed the first aptitude command and the second recommendation provided the real solution.