[Xen-devel] "out of memory" error when starting Domain 0

["Ross C Mcilroy" <mcilrorc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm about to start a Masters research project which will use Xen.  As such I'm trying to get it to work on my laptop (IBM T40).  I've built Xen 2.0.1 from the source tarball using the default .config file for the 2.6.9 kernel.  I'm using Suse 9.1 as the distribution on top.   

When I boot Xen, It seems to boot the Xen hypervisitor ok, then starts booting the linux kernel.  It gets as far as loading INIT, but then brings up an out of memory message:

  DMA per-cpu:
  cpu 0 hot: low 2, high 6, batch 1
  cpu 0 cold: low 0, high 2, batch 1
  Normal per-cpu: empty
  HighMem per-cpu: empty

  Free pages:     128kB (0kB HighMem)
  Active:642 inactive:1 dirty:0 writeback:0 unstable:0 free:32 slab:718 mapped:512 pagetables:87
  DMA free:128kB low 256kB high 384kB active:2348kB inactive:0kB present:16000kB
  protections[]: 0 0 0
  Normal free:0kB min:0kB low:0kB high:0kB active:0kB inactive:0kB present:0kB protections[]: 0 0 0
  HighMem free:0kB min:128kB low:256kB high384kB active:0kB inactive:0kB present:0kB protections[]: 0 0 0
  DMA: 2*4kB 1*8kB 1*16kB 3*32kB 0*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 128kB
  Normal: empty
  HighMem: empty
  Swap cache: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0, race 0+0
  Out of Memory: killing process 670 (hotplug)

It repeats this a number of times with different process numbers (but always hotplug), then it tries to kill INIT, then there are various other messages and it reboots because it can't find any other processes to kill.

Unfortunatly I don't have a null modem cable to save the boot messages on an other machine (the laptop doesn't even have a serial port), so I can't see all of the boot messages.

The grub entry for Xen is:

  title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6.9 (original)
    kernel (hd0,2)/boot/xen.gz dom0mem=131072
    module (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-xen0 root=/dev/hda3 console=tty0


I would be very greatful for any help.

Thanks

Ross