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Re: [Xen-users] Xen on RHEL 5.1 to para-virt Ubuntu Gusty

Mark Williamson wrote:

Sound nice because I already have a full virtualized Ubuntu on RHEL at the
moment. How did you switch to paravirt? Do you just install the Ubuntu Xen
kernel and reboot?

Almost that, yeah.
...
I've occasionally pondered modifying the Xen tools to make it possible (and easy) to "dual boot" between PV and HVM modes. Do you think this would be useful?

*very* useful; I've had no end of trouble booting the same image in both PV and HVM modes, and I've given up. a manual change is hard enough - on F8, after using virt-install, I have to change fstab, mess with SELinux, modprobe.conf, inittab, and so on, get a new initrd, label (and enable?!) the swap partition, and so on. Even after that lot I don't think a virt-install-created PV image will boot up as HVM. I can't understand why this lot should be necessary. You end up with a non-standard distribution which is difficult to understand or maintain (and apps running in the DomU would have to *really* dumb if they can't figure out that they're running virtualised).

From the user perspective, this would be a great thing to have. It would be nice to start with a stock install (perhaps one you dual-booted from previously), boot it as an HVM DomU, and then gradually paravirtualise it if/when necessary, changing back if you get it wrong. Ideally, all the necessary changes should be hidden in the kernel, where the user can't see them. I think this would probably take out 90% of the complexity of using Xen for new users, for what should be a fairly modest effort.

Evan

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