Re: [Xen-users] How much is involved in porting a new OS to Xen fullvirtualizaiton?

["sven waeyenbergh" <sven.waeyenbergh@xxxxxxxxx>]

This could also be related to the bad implementation of real mode on intel.
I have been having a lot of troubles getting the boot opensolaris in HVM on intel, but it boots just fine on AMD/Pacifica.
i heard that even Suse has troubles booting on intel in HVM.
Do you have any Pacifica-capable AMD hardware to try this on ?

Ban

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Nick Couchman <Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, first, you're going to have a lot of trouble getting anyone to touch SCO these days.  With all the legal stuff they've pulled over the past couple of years I'm sure that no one is going to be eager to get in their way on purpose.

 

What issues are you having getting SCO to run under XEN?  Theoretically, with XEN HVM support, you ought to be able to run just about any O/S.  XEN HVMs emulate a standard set of hardware similar to VMware, so you just need to figure out what the hardware is and make sure the correct drivers are loaded.  I've run into some issues with O/Ss on XEN HVMs, but mostly they're older O/Ss that don't support idle calls to the CPU (like DOS with Symantec Ghost).  Let us know what trouble you're having with OpenServer and maybe someone out there has experience getting it to run on XEN.

 

If it doesn't run on XEN at all, making it work would probably involve something like writing device drivers that support the XEN hardware.  Also, you can bet there will be a difference between the default drivers included with the O/S and optimized drivers - similar to VMware's Tools and the PV drivers for Windows under XEN.  Writing the optimized ("PV") drivers is going to be the next step, and I'm afraid I can't help you there and that you'll run into a lot of people who don't want to touch SCO - either out of fear or out of disgust.

 

-Nick

>>> On 2008/04/11 at 01:45, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm looking at SCO OpenServer 5.0.6, for various reasons. I contacted
Citrix, and they weren't interested in pursuing it as a new
virtualization platform, so I'm stuck with VMware. But I'm finding
VMware to be less snappy than I remember Xen being for other operating
systems (and I've tried RHEL on both systems), and to have less graceful
overall system tools for the server.

So, I'm thinking: what's involved in getting Xen to support a new OS for
full virtualization? I've got a Dell server running RHEL 5.1 with plenty
of disk and RAM, Intel chips with full virtualization turned on, it
boots up from the installation CD and then hangs. This happens with
RHEL's provided Xen software, the Xen 3.2 downloads, the commercial Xen
server from Citrix, etc. So, what is involved in the debugging process
for new guest OS's? Is there any estimate of how painful it would be to do?

SCO Openserver is running fine under VMware Workstation, telling it to
use IDE disks instead of the driver complexity to use SCSI. So I assume
that in theory, Xen could support a similar configuration, and get me
away from the VMware bugs of refusing to admit that the image is being
installed on another partition and the available space is from *THAT*
partition, not my / partition. And the VMware init scripts don't handle
auto-starting your multiple virtual images well except from a VNC, which
I consider to be iinsane.

---

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