Re: Issue with Ubuntu and Xen-3.3.2

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	hello David.  thanks for the suggestions.  The 4.6 kernel came up in
paravirtual mode with two CPU's without a problem.  To do the installation,
I took the initrd.img file that came with the Ubuntu distribution and
combined it with the module tree of the 4.6 kernel.  Then, I configured 3
disks:  The target vm's virtual hard disk, the Ubuntu ISO as a cdrom and
the ramdisk containing the contents of the doctored initrd image.  From
there, the thing boots into the installation menu on the xenconsole and,
while it's necessary to execute a shell at various points to do things like
mount the cdrom image in the right place and modprobe the ext4 driver so
you can mount the newly formatted virtual disk, you can complete the
installation pretty easily.  Once done, I started the shell one more time,
ran  dpkg against the kernel package I used to boot the thing, and
installed the kernel on the virtual hard disk.  This has the side effect of
generating an initrd.img file in the /boot directory which contains all of
the modules necessary to get the machine up and running.  Finally, as a
final step, rather than using pygrub to load everything,  since I'm not
sure that version of pygrub understands ext4 filesystems, I copied the
vmlinuz  and initrd.img files into the directory containing the vm's files
on dom0 and set the configuration to boot the kernel directly, using the
initrd.img file as a ramdisk.  This causes everything to come up in
multiuser mode and required no changes from our standard setup for any of
the domU's we have running.
	
This is probably more than you wanted to know, but maybe these notes will
help someone reading the mailing list in a little while when they try to
get Ubuntu running under a Xen domain.  If nothing else, it will help me
when I forget what I did in a year. :)

-Brian

On Feb 13,  9:56pm, David Brownlee wrote:
} Subject: Re: Issue with Ubuntu and Xen-3.3.2
} On 10 February 2017 at 21:12, Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost> wrote:
} 
} If its the same issue I saw with Ubuntu 16 under xen4.6 then its the
} 4.4 Linux kernel. If you can break into the Linux boot menu and select
} the 3.6 Kernel it should run fine, alternatively putting on a 4.6
} Kernel should also work. Both workarounds, but at least they might get
} you booting...
>-- End of excerpt from David Brownlee