In Search of Xen

wirser · Post by **wirser** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 9:40 pm

Well as I have previously stated I am now in the ealy stages of running Xen on my dualcore macine. For those who do not know Xen (tm) is a project to er um lets say "manage" and even run different OS's at the same time, concurrently on a "single" Linux machine. To do this one requirement is to have 686 or better cpu. The second requirement is that it must use grub bootloader (at least for fedora). http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/ for details.
Basicly I have followed http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstartFC5 to the point of having the xen kernel installed and selectable at boot and xend running in this kernel
envirorment . Right now on one machine I have two hd one with 40gb fc5 (original) ,the other with 80gb fc5 with SE enabled strict firewall (at least it says it is) which can be as regular fc5 or xen. I had problems with SE policy requiring me to moify SEpoliy in firewall settings under catagory "others" check poilcies for xend and xm . net to trouble me was my network wasn't working .
The networking is a bit trickey, it all depends on the file in /etc/xen named "xend-config.sxp" make a copy of the original before playing here
what I learned is that there are three pairs of net...../vfs.... cmds and you choose the one that works for you - either bridged ,NAT or MAC . There isn't much to screwup but if you have a virgin copy your safe I played with it until it worked (mine was the last choice for dsl)
it is working so I can't complain. I haven't start a virtual system but my old hd will be the source.
The biggest problem as far as using it with VS is that the kmod-nvidia-xen0 causes kernel panics- so no three dimensiion rendering available right now

more when I experience and write about it

wirser · Post by **wirser** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 3:31 pm

Well the nvidia-kmod 8774-86_64.fc5xen0 already has a bugreport at livna.org #1164.
The xen system is like in some sci-fi movies where it looks like there are two bodiies for one charector, the original and the second image. All of the system resources are mirrored, for example eth0 becomes peth0 for networking- both for the hypervisor and other zen enviorments. What this means is that for my nvidia kmod I need two packages one for the hypervisor and and for the slave process being in fact there will be at least two kernels running at the same time. there is a work around using the nvidia install instead of the livna.
I am trying to keep the xensys using native fedora rpms if possible. I am getting alot of audit notices using runlevel 3 to startup. but being that I'm running SE enabled with xen rules that adds many complications.
Second item was looking at another game named ufoai anyways they have a section on using valgrind to develope callmaps so I tried it on vegastrike. Valgrind is a debugging tool anyways it found problems right away I still have to resaerch what it is telling me so be prepared for possilbe more bugreports

wirser · Post by **wirser** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 7:14 pm

Well here is what I know so far

still no luck getting the kmod-nvidia-86-64 running
even with fc6 I still get kernel panics
questions to fedora irc about go unanswered
livna which packages th rpm for the kmod-nvidia-86-64 know of the problem for the last three fc5 kernels

bottom line Xen need more time than I can give it at present

Post by **loki1950** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:20 pm

so you have made the move to Zod user stat from the Fedora Foruom just before i log in here it's my home page

11454(543 members and 10911 geasts)

that and the yum repos for fc5 being down last week

it seems that every newby on the web is installing Zod

i'am waiting for the dust to settle a bit before i pluge.have the iso's thou

2 some hrs on the torrent.BTW Orge 3d 1.2 lib is now in extras

have fun

Enjoy the Choice

wirser · Post by **wirser** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 2:11 am

so you have made the move to Zod

I wasn't planning originall to install it but I was on #fedora on they need sys too seed torrent on day one so I set up torrent to help

i'am waiting for the dust to settle a bit before i pluge

wish I would've but I got it running without too many problems but there are still lot's of wierd behavior eg. gedit if you close without saving you get both the "close" ... window and the window not responding window right after 1 or 2 seconds - if that long

I have fc5 to fallback on- had to reload it though LVM got me in trouble working between fc6 and fc5 volumes

They pushed too hard IMHO to release
Had I known then .... I'd wait for the movie

Post by **loki1950** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 2:55 am

i was going to install right away myself but i managed to update fc5 to a stable state and compile VS so i'll stay with fc5 for a while lomger. they did push hard for this release and slipped a few times too

Enjoy the Choice

wirser · Post by **wirser** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 10:21 pm

I'm not sure what's up but it seems something behind the scenes at RH is taking place. I see it in the IRC channel and it is making me think twice about my "brand loyalty". It seem like RH want to become "pay per veiw" more and more.

Part of my trouble is me in that I am growing more competent in linux but still to keep up with reinstalling every six month I always seem to take a step or two backwards on something else I playing with during the transition.I am getting with trying to find the often micrscopic changes between ver "x" to ver "y" that are causing me trouble only to finally work things out and ver "z" comes out
Playing on a 64 bit system doesn't help either. I' m fed up whith submitting bugreports only to see "it's not my problem" in the replies (not from vs). OSS is starting to look more and more like M$land at least where I'm at now. I can't blame RH either, they have thier own goals but sometimes !@##$$%%^

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Nov 26, 2006 12:57 am

like the fact they are ignoring FF 2 in favor of FF 3.0 Gnome's move to Mono is a bit scarier IMO.

Enjoy the Choice