[Xen-users] CentOS 5.4 64bit default Xen install won't start, garbled boot screen

[Ben Bradley <batfastad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone

Ok this is really strange. I've been messing around with Xen for the
past few weeks on a 32bit test machine and CentOS 5.4 and it's been
working fine.
Today I went into the office on a Sunday to install Xen on our server
but I had a major problem.

The server is a home-build with a Tyan s5211 motherboard with an Intel
i3210w chipset
CentOS 5.4 64bit installed and rebooted several times without any issues.
So I installed Xen using the basic "yum install kernel-xen xen" and
made the changes to grub to try booting Xen. This server also has a
3Ware 9690SA-8i RAID card in it as well.
I also tried with the latest stable Xen from the gitco.de repositories
(3.4.1) but that gave me the same problem so I reverted to the default
CentOS Xen version.

It started off fine but just after the section of the boot "waiting
for driver initialization" the screen became garbled with all the boot
messages and coloured blocks scrolling up the screen at mega-speed so
I had no chance of reading the output on the screen.
After a quick google I found this person running Debian on the same
board with the same problem...
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-xen-devel/2009-August/002438.html

I tried uninstalling then re-installed the latest Xen from the
gitco.de repos and the same thing happened.
Ubuntu 8.04 has been running on this machine for the last 18 months or
so without any problems.

I connected to the serial console port and watched what was happening
and changed loglvl=all
Here's the serial console output:
http://www.highbeeches.plus.com/xenconsoleoutput.txt
I tried checking for when in the console output that the garbled
screen started and it was either the "kjournald starting" line or
after that. Anything above that line the screen output was fine.

Here's my menu.lst for reference
I changed default=0, added those console options to get the serial
connection going and added loglvl=all to get more info when I started
to have problems.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda3
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /xen.gz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5 com1=115200,8n1 sync_console
loglvl=all
        module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen ro root=LABEL=/
console=ttyS0 console=tty
        module /initrd-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-164.6.1.el5)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5 ro root=LABEL=/
        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-164.el5)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.el5 ro root=LABEL=/
        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-164.el5.img


Anyone got any ideas of what could be going on here?
I'd really like to get Xen up and running on this machine

Thanks, B

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