[Fedora-xen] Getting Fedora yum-installed domU running on fedora with fedora-xen packages

[Paul Wouters]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006, Henning Sprang wrote:

> as I already said, these things can be handled by making a special
> initrd... Still, a Debian guest won't work, but works with no problem
> with a Kernel from xensource.

There are many things that are unfortunately biting you when mixing
debian and fedora kernels/xen. Unfortunate, because this is exactly
what endusers of xen hope to archive.

I found the entire debian mkinitrd quite messy. they seem to no longer
have mkinitrd, only as part of the yaird package, which is one that
can only really generate an initrd image for the running kernel (yeah
right, then i likely don't need it anymore eh?).

Using an initrd created with fedora on debian fails because they seem to
be handling the change of root from initrd different. Might be related
to pivot root changes?

On top of that, we ran into the pae vs no pae issue as well between
these systems, so that we also could not boot fedora kernels/initrds
from a debian xen0 either.

All in all, our migration from xen2 to xen3 has caused us many headaches,
and so far, the xen3 setup is less flexable then we had before. I think
if xen2 had been available for kernels > 2.6.12, I would have backed out
halfway and gone back to xen2.

I did however, get some more appreciation for the additions that redhat
has added to the xensource default builds. Perhaps I should phase out
our < 512MB debian xen0's for some stripped down version of FC6 that fits
in the same amount of space.

Paul