Re: Installing Debian HVM DomU on Xen: Grub installation error

[Paul Leiber <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 23.12.25 um 12:06 schrieb Paul Leiber:
> Hi,
>
> due to ongoing instabilities with Xen on a Raspberry Pi (seemingly 
> random crashes where I couldn't figure out the cause yet, I suspect 
> networking as the root cause), I am switching to a low-powered x64 
> platform (APU 4D4 with GX-412TC CPU). I already have the same hardware 
> running very stably for a couple of years with Xen for a different 
> purpose.
> I now have installed Debian Trixie as a Dom0 on the hardware, and then 
> went through the usual hoops to install Xen on the system, which seems 
> to be running running fine so far.
> Then I tried to install a Debian DomU. It seems that things have 
> gotten more complicated than I am used to:
> - The xen-tools package with the handy create-xen-image tool is not 
> available for Trixie. Ok, install a Debian HVM instead.
> - Starting a HVM DomU with networking is not possible without manually 
> installing ipxe-qemu package (bug 1120146 which already has been 
> fixed, but is not in the current release yet [1]).
> - When running the Debian (I tried both Trixie and Bookworm, with the 
> same result) installer from a netinstall image as HVM DomU, the 
> installer fails while installing grub with error code 1 (last couple 
> of installation log lines below). I couldn't find any related bug so 
> far. I tried both BIOS and UEFI boot methods, with the same outcome.
> On the plus side, the issue with the OVMF package seems to have been 
> fixed? [2] At least the installation iso is booting with OVMF out of 
> the box.
> I now am stuck and would be grateful for any pointers, specifically:
>
> 1. Does anybody have a hint how to install a Debian Trixie HVM DomU?
> 2. Does anybody have xen-tools running or another efficient way to 
> create a Trixie PV DomU?
> Best regards,
>
> Paul 
For future reference: I managed to install Debian Trixie as a DomU. I 
tried starting a DomU by copying a config file from a Windows DomU and 
starting the Debian installation iso with this config. That worked. I 
guess some setting was missing in my initial config file. I didn't do 
the cross check yet, but I suspect that setting hdtype='ahci' did the 
trick. The generic error error message in the Debian installation logs 
was not very helpful.
However, I wasn't really happy with the manual HVM installation method, 
therefore I had a closer look on the Debian xen-tools package. The 
Debian package is currently orphaned, but I could quite easily build the 
package from the source code [1]. With the xen-tools package, I could 
successfully install a Trixie DomU in a much more convenient way. I am 
very happy that xen-tools exists and is still working.
Best regards,

Paul

[1] https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools