Succinctly, nugget is a Dell PowerEdge 2800 server. We wanted to install a Xen kernel and get some guest operating systems going. It was installed with SuSE 10.0 ("evaluation", as far as we can tell). The Suse pages say to use the latest available versions from a public repository, but I had difficulty even getting those kernels to boot.

So now I'll turn my attention to building the latest stable version of Xen (3.0.1 as of this writing) from source.

Get the source from here.

Note that the README lies: it claims to give a list of packages you need, but leaves off the curses development libraries.

The Dell has no internal IDE disk or anything; by default, the Xen kernel builds the megaraid driver, but not the new-style one (CONFIG_MEGARAID_NEWGEN) which appears to be utterly required. Trying to copy a working kernel config and then doing make ARCH=xen oldconfig seems to be totally the wrong thing to do. Rather, do make ARCH=xen menuconfig and ensure that the new-style LSI Logic megaraid driver is built - not as a module - and that should be sufficient.

I booted with the following stanza in menu.lst :

title Xen 3.0
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /xen-3.0.gz dom0_mem=256M noirqbalance
    module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen0 root=/dev/sda9

The noirqbalance may not be required.

On nugget.cs, the build tree may be found in ~cscf-adm/xen/xen-3.0.1. All that was done was a make world, followed by fixing the kernel configs as found in the Xen User docs, and then a make install-kernels.

-- MikePatterson - 07,08 Mar 2006; 04 May 2006

Now Ahmed was having issues with udev. (ST#53537.) So I started faffing about, and discovered that 3.0.2 was released recently. Might as well give that a whirl.

Had many problems getting that 2.6.16 kernel to build and run; ultimately it boiled down to a sudden requirement for an initrd.

Making the initrd:

nugget xen/xen-3.0.2-2# /sbin/depmod 2.6.16-xen
nugget xen/xen-3.0.2-2# /sbin/mkinitrd -i initrd-2.6.16-xen.img -k
vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen
Root device:    /dev/sda9 (mounted on / as reiserfs)
Module list:    piix megaraid_mbox processor thermal fan reiserfs

Kernel image:   /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-xen
Initrd image:   /boot/initrd-2.6.16-xen.img
Shared libs:    lib64/ld-2.3.5.so lib64/libblkid.so.1.0 lib64/libc-2.3.5.so
lib64/libselinux.so.1 lib64/libuuid.so.1.2 lib/ld-2.3.5.so lib/libc-2.3.5.so
Cannot determine dependencies of module piix. Is modules.dep up to date?
Cannot determine dependencies of module megaraid_mbox. Is modules.dep up to
date?
Driver modules: piix megaraid_mbox processor thermal fan
Filesystem modules:     reiserfs
Including:      klibc initramfs udev fsck.reiserfs
Bootsplash:     SuSE (1024x768)
10466 blocks
nugget xen/xen-3.0.2-2#

And the menu.lst entry for GRUB:

title Xen 3.0
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /xen-3.0.gz dom0_mem=512M  noirqbalance console=vga
    module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen root=/dev/sda9 ro console=tty0 max_loop=256
    module /boot/initrd-2.6.16-xen.img

Otherwise, the install was a pretty straightforward make world, followed by a reconfiguration of the kernel to build the new LSI megaraid drivers statically (vs modules), and then an install.sh, all per TFM.

-- MikePatterson - 18,19 May 2006