[et-mgmt-tools] virt-install pxeboot issues

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 10:24:58PM -0800, Brendan Wood wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm working on trying to build hvm xen guests based on our kickstart
> servers, but it seems to be failing. I'm using CentOS 5, running kernel
> 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5.centos.plusxen and the xen 3.0.3-25.0.4.el5 rpm. I built
> libvirt 0.3.3 and python-virtinst 0.300.1 in order to test the pxeboot
> setup, but virt-install errors out and xm list shows the guest still
> running, but state is just '------' and Time is '0.0'. Shutting it down and
> creating it again causes it to shutdown immediately.

I'm afraid CentOS 5.0 will not support PXE boot since this capability 
was only added in the QEMU binary from Xen 3.1.0.  You might have more
luck with CentOS 5.1 - in RHEL-5.1 we updated the QEMU binary to that 
from 3.1.0, but I honestly can't remember offhand if we got PXE working.

If CentOS 5.1 doesn't work then I know for sure PXE works in the recently 
released Fedora 8. We also updated virt-manager to allow PXE in F8.

> I have a feeling the issue is that my xen install isn't new enough to
> support it. The qemu-dm log file says "qemu: invalid boot device in 'n'",
> which makes me think that network booting isn't actually set up in my
> installed version of qemu-dm. I just want to check to make sure it's not
> something else before I go and backport xen 3.1 into the kernel rpm in
> order to get the right qemu-dm binary.

Yep, that's because the QEMU in Xen 3.0.3 did not support PXE.


Regards,
Dan.
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