TheGrebs.com:IRC Logs:#xen:2005:04:30

---	Log	opened Sat Apr 30 00:00:03 2005
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05:32	knewt	aaaarrrggghhhh. basic dd use of my block device works fine, but put an ext2 on it and fill until it runs out of space and ext2 falls over with errors. so it must be going down a different, buggy, path in the second case. gah.
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10:54	bunoc	hello. anybody pls tell me can i convert my domain configuration file to .sxp format ?
10:55	bunoc	is possible, any tool to do that?
10:55	knewt	as long as your configuration file isn't dynamic it's easy. just add the -n parameter to xm create, like it says in the help
10:59	bunoc	knewt: then how can i ask xm to use that created file? xm create -c <created-sxp> ?
11:00	knewt	-F instead of -f, again mentioned in the help
11:01	knewt	(-f being optional, so you might not have been using it)
11:04	bunoc	unfortunately xm help is so long, and scroll down my screen
11:05	knewt	actually, it'd be "xm help create", and you just pipe it though less anyway
11:05	knewt	(or xm create -h)
11:06	bunoc	knewt: that helps. thank you
11:10	riel	you can always scroll back up your screen ;)
11:11	knewt	yay, my driver appears to be working (that bit of the functionality actually coded so far, anyway). i think on monday i can safely ask for some victims^Wfools^Wguineapigs^Wvolunteers
11:11	bunoc	riel: rite, but i cannot scroll up too far. there is a limition
11:12	riel	on such occasions, I ssh into the computer from another system
11:12	riel	and scroll up inside my xterm
11:12	riel	in fact - my test system doesn't even have a monitor or a keyboard ;)
11:12	riel	just a serial console
11:13	knewt	i need to get round to reactivating scrollback mode on my console server. i turned it off by mistake and it's really annoying sometimes
11:14	knewt	thing is, i have to log into the console server physically to do so, since i deactivated everything but console connections over the network
11:14	bunoc	riel: i am at aterm. still some limition on scrollback
11:15	bunoc	ok get to bed now. thank you all
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11:37	Surferdude	anyone here? I need help with brctl
11:44	riel	that's a bit vague ;)
11:44	Surferdude	Sorry... I compiled brclt
11:45	Surferdude	./configure and make
11:45	Surferdude	everything went ok... but xen's install.sh still says it isnt installed
11:46	riel	did you install it after compiling ?
11:46	Surferdude	yes... after compiling brctl i tried running install.sh
11:47	Surferdude	the command brctl dosnt work, but you can access brctl via the directory
11:47	Surferdude	and run it from there
11:48	riel	there's your problem
11:48	riel	the command brctl should just work
11:48	riel	otherwise you'll get a nasty surprise when starting up xend
11:49	Surferdude	So how do i fix it? put an alias in bash_profile?
11:49	knewt	Surferdude: you did "make install" after the "make", right?
11:50	Surferdude	no... guess i should
11:51	Surferdude	[root@plain brctl]# make install
11:51	Surferdude	mkdir -p /usr/local/sbin
11:51	Surferdude	/usr/bin/install -c -m 755 brctl /usr/local/sbin
11:51	Surferdude	[root@plain brctl]#
11:51	Surferdude	:/
11:51	Surferdude	brb
11:51	knewt	ok, so it's installed it into /usr/local/sbin now
11:51	knewt	riel: fancy being one of my volunteers sometime next week?
11:51	riel	volunteering for what ?
11:52	knewt	testing out the driver i've been writing
11:52	riel	what's it for?
11:52	knewt	copy-on-write devicemapper target
11:53	riel	nice
11:53	riel	that sounds like fun
11:54	knewt	it's still very early alpha status (several bits of planned functionality not coded yet for one thing), but it /appears/ to be working ok now
11:56	knewt	i had a hateful moment at one point where i gave an invalid value to another bit of kernel code by mistake, and instead of validating it it just accepted it and then shortly afterwards crashed
12:16	xai	eeyores birthay today!
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14:58	_MarkW	knewt: ping
15:05	knewt	_MarkW: 'lo
15:05	_MarkW	hey, how's it goin?
15:06	_MarkW	any luck with the CoW driver?
15:07	knewt	good. i appear to have working basic functionality up and working :)
15:07	_MarkW	wicked :-)
15:07	_MarkW	booted a domain off it yet?
15:08	knewt	nope, but shortly after i got the full code written i /did/ move from testing it directly on my laptop to inside of a domU on one of my servers. got tired of having to reboot my laptop quite so often :)
15:09	_MarkW	heh :-) should speed things up.
15:09	knewt	for the moment i've been testing on top of loopback devices inside the domU
15:09	_MarkW	OK, sounds like a good plan - much faster rebooting a domU than a whole machine.
15:09	_MarkW	(plus Kip's domain coredump code is available in the unstable tree now)
15:09	knewt	i've been editing the source on my laptop, building an updated domU kernel, scping it to the server and booting up the domU
15:10	knewt	haven't actually moved over to -unstable yet tbh
15:10	Surferdude	anyone know how to switch from lilo to grub?
15:10	_MarkW	knewt: no, probably sensible ;-)
15:11	_MarkW	Surferdude: first step - make sure you have a means to boot your machine and fix things if you toast your MBR ;-)
15:11	Surferdude	i have a kvm... hopefully that should be enough
15:12	_MarkW	do you have physical access to this machine if necessary?
15:12	Surferdude	guess lilo -u /dev/hda should do it
15:12	knewt	my main moment of hate was when i tracked down the reason for an annoying, very repeatable oops. another bit of the kernel that i was calling into doesn't bother to validate incoming parameters, leading to the crash happening within an entirely different kernel thread from my code
15:13	_MarkW	knewt: lots of moments of hate to be had when hacking the kernel ;-)
15:13	Surferdude	ok... lilo is removed
15:13	Surferdude	how do I get grub on?
15:13	_MarkW	Surferdude: you're moving quickly ;-)
15:14	Surferdude	=P
15:14	_MarkW	have you installed the grub packages for your distro?
15:14	Surferdude	yup
15:14	Surferdude	typing grub at an ssh prompt brings up the grub menu
15:14	_MarkW	there's a program called "grub-install" which may suffice (read the warnings in the man page) or you can do it manually from the grub prompt.
15:15	knewt	i was passing a sector count, and had forgotten to check first that it was actually > 0. the other code just assumed that the count was at least 1, and it led to falling off the end of a linked list, trying to dereference an invalid pointer
15:15	_MarkW	knewt: eeek! that's rather non-obvious :-(
15:15	Surferdude	[root@plain boot]# grub-install /dev/hda
15:15	Surferdude	Installation finished. No error reported.
15:15	Surferdude	This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
15:15	Surferdude	Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
15:15	Surferdude	fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.
15:15	Surferdude	# this device map was generated by anaconda
15:15	Surferdude	(fd0) /dev/fd0
15:15	Surferdude	(hd0) /dev/hda
15:15	Surferdude	[root@plain boot]#
15:15	Surferdude	I hope that works
15:16	knewt	hehe. grub-install works great for basic stuff. of course, i've had great fun installing grub on my systems other than the laptop g
15:16	_MarkW	Surferdude: looks sane. You'll need to write a menu.lst file.
15:17	Surferdude	looks like one was generated
15:17	Surferdude	and all the entrys look good
15:17	knewt	my favourite was when i installed linux on my dad's system for him in a dual-boot config. the bios on this system thinks it's helpful to change the "bios order" of drives depending on what the boot device was
15:17	_MarkW	knewt: what are you doing for storing block remappings? one of the problems I'm aware of with LVM is it's painful memory usage due to storing all exceptions in RAM.
15:18	_MarkW	knewt: that's just weird! bios writers are twisted human beings!
15:18	_MarkW	Surferdude: if you're happy with it (and have a way to get at the machine and fix it) then it's probably time to reboot.
15:18	Surferdude	just did
15:18	_MarkW	it work?
15:18		* Surferdude watches the kvm
15:19		* _MarkW crosses his fingers
15:19	Surferdude	grub menu is showing
15:19		* Surferdude presses enter and crosses his fingers
15:19	_MarkW	woohoo! :-)
15:19	Surferdude	Looking good...
15:20	Surferdude	Yup... at a login prompt on the kvm
15:21	Surferdude	Time to edit menu.lst and boot into xen (hopefully)
15:21	_MarkW	wicked! Xen next :-)
15:21	_MarkW	Surferdude: you using Debian by any chance?
15:22	Surferdude	nope... DC refused to install it
15:22	Surferdude	RHEL only... fighres
15:22	Surferdude	*figurez
15:22	Surferdude	**figures
15:24	Surferdude	Ok... so i need to configure my grub.conf
15:24	_MarkW	I thought RHEL used grub by default... (I guess it's an install-time option)
15:24	Surferdude	Dont ask... EV1 is weird
15:24	_MarkW	Yup. There's some guidelines in the manual.
15:25	_MarkW	Should help you get Xen up and running, then you can start installing domains!
15:25	Surferdude	which version of vmlinuz should i use?
15:26	_MarkW	You need to use the vmlinuz-foo-xen0
15:27	_MarkW	you can run any domain using a xen0 kernel. xenU is the same but without drivers for real hardware (hence smaller) - it can only run in unpriv domains.
15:27	Surferdude	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6-xen0
15:28	Surferdude	now for root
15:28	_MarkW	hang on...
15:28	_MarkW	kernel xen.gz
15:28	Surferdude	k
15:28	_MarkW	sorry: kernel /xen.gz
15:28	_MarkW	module /vmlinuz-2.6.whatever-xen0
15:28	_MarkW	k?
15:29	Surferdude	ok
15:29	Surferdude	and what do i do for root
15:29	_MarkW	set it the same as for your other grub entries.
15:29	Surferdude	Ok
15:29	_MarkW	make sure the path to xen.gz and vmlinuz is the same as the path for the other grub entries
15:30	_MarkW	what flavour of RHEL is this? you use udev?
15:30	Surferdude	i think its version three (taroon)
15:31	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
15:31	Surferdude	root (hd0,0)
15:31	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz
15:31	Surferdude	module /vmlinux-2.6-xen0
15:31	Surferdude	good?
15:31	knewt	_MarkW: quick calculation says that with the default chunk size, a 2GB cow mapping will take up about 164Kb, increasing as required during high concurrency cow-ing
15:32	knewt	i think i've got the calculations correct
15:32	_MarkW	Surferdude: yes but you need to add some arguments to the xen and vmlinux lines
15:32	Surferdude	like the ro and root=/dev/sda
15:32	_MarkW	have a look at the user manual for some examples
15:32	_MarkW	yup.
15:32	_MarkW	knewt: OK, that sounds not too bad :-)
15:32	_MarkW	what does the on-disk layout look like?
15:33	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
15:34	Surferdude	root (hd0,0)
15:34	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz ro root=/dev/sda
15:34	Surferdude	module /vmlinux-2.6-xen0
15:35	knewt	i'm going to create a mode with a small header to the bitmap, but the basic version i've started with is a pure bitmap, nothing else. you can use completely seperate bitmap and cow devices if you want (and i have been during testing)
15:36	_MarkW	Surferdude: nope. ro and root are arguments that Linux is interested in
15:36	_MarkW	so they go on the Linux line. there are different arguments for Xen itself.
15:36	Surferdude	Yeah, i was just looking at the manual
15:37	knewt	_MarkW: i've also managed to keep concurrency within the in-memory structures about as high as i think is possible :)
15:37	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
15:37	Surferdude	root (hd0,0)
15:37	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
15:37	Surferdude	module /vmlinux-2.6-xen0 root=/dev/sda ro
15:37	Surferdude	I think i got it this time
15:37	_MarkW	knewt: that's good to hear
15:38	_MarkW	Surferdude: I thought your root was on hda?
15:38	knewt	i'll try and come up with a nice ascii-diagrammed text file describing the algorithm if you're interested?
15:38	Surferdude	I think so...
15:39	Surferdude	and all the other entrys are root=LABEL=/
15:40	Surferdude	maybe i should try that?
15:40	_MarkW	knewt: only if you have time :-)
15:40	_MarkW	the main problems with previous solutions were memory usage and the on-disk layout
15:41	_MarkW	and performance of course ;-)
15:43	knewt	once a particular chunk has been cow'ed it's virtually no overhead above a simple linear mapping for writing (a single bit-test). and reading is always just basicaly a single bit-test over a linear
15:43	_MarkW	a couple of other things that we noted as important when Bin looked into this: how much disk space do you think the metadata will require? how much work might resizing support require?
15:45	knewt	assuming you just want to resize the cow'ed device (and i can't see resizing the backing device making sense), i'd suggest just appending a linear mapping after the cow mapping and then resizing the filesystem
15:46	_MarkW	Ian had a plan to thread remapping metadata in between CoW'd blocks (!) on the writeable device. That way, some seeks are (hopefully) avoided and the resizing of the writeable volume should Just Work.
15:46	_MarkW	Do you have problems with the size of your bitmap if resizing is done?
15:47	Surferdude	getting a file not found on the vmlinuz when bootinf
15:47	Surferdude	booting
15:48	knewt	that 2GB example from earlier, with the default chunk size, takes 64Kb of bitmap space on disk. when header code is in i would imagine only 512bytes or 1Kb for the header.
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15:48	_MarkW	Surferdude: double check your grub options for typos (maybe vmlinux vs vmlinuz?)
15:49	Surferdude	your right... heh
15:49	Surferdude	I knew this kvm would come in handy
15:50		* knewt finds a terminal server very handy
15:50		* _MarkW uses running down the corridor with a hammer instead of a kvm
15:51	Surferdude	I tried installing Xen on this machine, but it wouldent boot no matter what i tried
15:51	riel	a hammer? you have to hit that reset button really hard, huh? ;)
15:51	_MarkW	The server room seems conveniently close until you have to start going there every 2 minutes.
15:51	riel	nothing like serial console + remote power switch
15:52	_MarkW	riel: If your machines don't respect you, you got nothin' ;-)
15:52	knewt	i keep meaning to build my own remote power switch :)
15:52	Surferdude	lol
15:52	_MarkW	Surferdude: you must be close to Xenification now though...
15:52	Surferdude	Yup
15:54	_MarkW	whoa! just spent an hour on this filesystem code without noticing!
15:54	_MarkW	time for a typing break, i'll be back in a bit.
15:56	Surferdude	well... it boots the profile, but still getting the nfs error
15:56	Surferdude	"unable to mount root fs via nfs"
15:57	Surferdude	anyone?
15:59	knewt	what have you used as root= ?
15:59	Surferdude	root=LABEL=/
15:59	knewt	that won't work without an initrd
15:59	Surferdude	ah
15:59	knewt	just use the actual device name. much easier imho
16:00	yosh	is initrd known broken with xen 2.0.5?
16:02	knewt	not that i'm aware. i'm using an initrd a -testing not that much further along than 2.0.5 iirc
16:02	knewt	s/initrd a/initrd with a/
16:02	yosh	hm, I was running into trouble
16:03	knewt	i need it to boot off an evms device :)
16:03	yosh	Initial guest OS requires too much space
16:03	yosh	(3500MB is greater than 512MB limit)
16:03	yosh	ERROR: Error constructing guest OS
16:04	Surferdude	trying /dev/sda
16:05	knewt	err. didn't grub-install say it was /dev/hda ?
16:06	yosh	the initrd is only 4 MB, so I'm not sure where it's getting the 3500MB from
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16:14	Surferdude	dev/hda isnt working either :(
16:14	Surferdude	Unable to mount root fs on unknown block
16:15	Surferdude	help?
16:17	_MarkW	Surferdude: you need to create some device nodes or a Xen initrd
16:17	Surferdude	just define another module?
16:17	_MarkW	yosh: what version of Xen are you running? I remember a bug with initrds a while ago
16:17	Surferdude	in grub.conf?
16:18	_MarkW	Surferdude: yes, but you should strictly run mkinitrd to make a Xenified initrd (your exsiting RHEL initrd might work, tho)
16:18	yosh	_MarkW: 2.0.5
16:19	_MarkW	yosh: weird. it should work. can you have a quick search of the mail archives for the "requires too much space" or similar errors?
16:20	_MarkW	i think the problem was resolved there (it might even be fixed in -testing, I guess)
16:20	Surferdude	run intrd from a shell prompt?
16:20	Surferdude	mkintrd?
16:21	yosh	_MarkW: I didn't find anything
16:21	_MarkW	yosh: definitely there somewhere. it could be in either xen-users or xen-devel, or on the sf.net xen-devel list
16:22	_MarkW	Surferdude: mkinitrd auto-builds an initrd.
16:22	_MarkW	try the RHEL initrd first tho - might work.
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16:26	yosh	_MarkW: ah, it's on sf.net (bleh, I hate the list interface there)
16:27	_MarkW	yosh: so do I. GMane, I believe, has a unified archive for both the old and new xen-devel lists.
16:28	_MarkW	yosh: does it give any clues about your problem?
16:28	Surferdude	This is getting really really annoying
16:28	yosh	_MarkW: still looking...
16:31	_MarkW	Surferdude: try mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-xen0.img 2.6.11-xen0
16:35	Surferdude	at a shell prompt
16:35	Surferdude	?
16:36	_MarkW	Surferdude: yup. that'll build you a Xenified RHEL initrd (you might have to tweak the naming depending on the version you've installed)
16:36	_MarkW	you can then stick that in another module line and it might even work!
16:45	knewt	_MarkW: ok, i've got some completely unscientific speed test results :) writing out 1gig to a linear mapping took 28seconds. the same with a brand new cow mapping took 35seconds. then filled up the cow mapping filesystem to the max, removed the dummy file, and wrote out the 1gig again. 28.7seconds
16:47	_MarkW	knewt: sounds promising!
16:51	knewt	i could probably get it faster by providing an option to not write out the bitmap more frequently then every N jiffies, but i'm not sure if i'd want to create an unsafe option like that
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16:53	knewt	once i've got everything i've already planned up and working, i might look at creating an interwoven bitmap/cow mode
16:54	knewt	see how much if any speed improvement that might give
16:55	_MarkW	cool. a decent cow implementation would be very useful to a lot of people
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16:59	knewt	want to be a guineapig^Wvolunteer sometime next week?
17:02	_MarkW	knewt: i'm interested to see what you come up with but can't guarantee when i'll get a chance to try it out
17:04	_MarkW	if you send me a link, i can have a poke at some point
17:04	_MarkW	alternatively, if you post to xen-devel I imagine you will get plenty of feedback ;-)
17:05	knewt	heh. yeah. i want to do some clean-up at minimum before i give it out for testing, which is why sometime next week
17:05	knewt	i might even get the background cow-ifying mode in there in that time
17:06	_MarkW	background cowifying?
17:07	_MarkW	sounds cool whatever it is...
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17:09	knewt	the standard mode is "ondemand", which only copies across from the backing device to the cow device when a write is carried out. "background" mode additionally makes copies of chunks spontaneously from a very low priority thread running in the background
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17:13	knewt	so you could, for instance, create a new cow mapping for a domain, and use background mode. even if no writes are made to the mapping, eventually the entire contents will be cow-ified across and will increase the event count of the device. so you could have a user task waiting on that event, and when it triggers load a new linear mapping into the inactive table slot and then switch over to it
17:16	knewt	did that get through?
17:17	_MarkW	yup
17:18	_MarkW	i was distracted
17:18	_MarkW	makes sense.
17:18	_MarkW	basically a fork() for disks that eventually makes them independent - cool.
17:18	knewt	cool. my tunnel was down for a couple of minutes due to the annoying 24h bounce. i've never sent text through during that time before
17:19	_MarkW	24h bounce?
17:19	knewt	over here the isp's are gits and even on adsl they like, all, bounce you every 24 hours
17:20	_MarkW	Ah, that's pretty nasty!
17:20	knewt	you can't even get a single static IP without paying for a business line
17:20	knewt	i used to have a /29 on a residential when i was still in the UK
17:24	_MarkW	my connectivity is via the university, so it's fairly decent
17:26	knewt	unfortunately i run out of money in about a month or two for the virtual server i pay for, at which point i'll lose the tunnel :(
17:27	_MarkW	:-(
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17:36	riel	knewt: get a free ipv6 tunnel for your irc connections ;)
17:38	_MarkW	Surferdude: did you have any luck with mkinitrd?
17:40	knewt	XenSource don't have any jobs going do they? g
17:41	riel	you might want to ask
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17:44	_MarkW	knewt: no idea but it might actually be worth asking. they don't seem to advertise as such for tech positions, so if you don't ask, you won't get.
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18:36	Surferdude	back to work...
18:39	_MarkW	Surferdude: heh :-) let me know how you get on
18:39	Surferdude	what was that command again?
18:40	_MarkW	mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-xen0.img 2.6.11-xen0
18:40	_MarkW	or something like that
18:43	Surferdude	lib/modules/2.6.11-xen0 is not a directory
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18:47	_MarkW	Surferdude: what is your vmlinuz called?
18:47	Surferdude	hold on... booting
18:47	Surferdude	getting a serial input error
18:47	Surferdude	on booting xen
18:47	_MarkW	the version number to mkinitrd should be the same as that version
18:47	Surferdude	diddnt let me do mkinitrd
18:48	_MarkW	it should work.
18:49	Surferdude	is there any way to access grub.conf from grub itself
18:49	hollis	doesn't GRUB have a "cat" command?
18:49	Surferdude	no clue
18:49	hollis	well, are you in GRUB now?
18:50	knewt	yes, it has a cat command
18:51	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
18:51	Surferdude	root (hd0,0)
18:51	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
18:51	Surferdude	module /vmlinuz-2.4-xen0 root=/dev/hda ro
18:51	Surferdude	initrd /intrd-2.4.21-27.el.img
18:52	Surferdude	Whenever i boot that configuration, i get a serial input error
18:54	_MarkW	Surferdude: don't use an "initrd" line, use a second module line.
18:54	_MarkW	the grub initrd line will break things - don't ask me why :-)
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19:09	Surferdude	still getting this stupid serial input error... argh!
19:11	Surferdude	has anyone experienced this?
19:16	_MarkW	Surferdude: nope, never heard of it before
19:20	Surferdude	Ok... changed the kernel back to the way it was and now getting the "cannot mount root fs" message
19:20	Surferdude	mkinitrd isnt working
19:22	knewt	i notice it's a 2.4 kernel. is the filesystem designed for devfs and you don't have devfs compiled into the dom0 kernel?
19:23	Surferdude	how would i find that out
19:24	_MarkW	yes, i was worried about the 2.4-ness as well
19:24	_MarkW	Surferdude: what release of RHEL is this?
19:25	_MarkW	Surferdude: to find out if you're using devfs, type "mount" under an standard boot of RHEL and see if devfs is listed
19:25	Surferdude	ok
19:25	Surferdude	rebooting now
19:25	Surferdude	was trying to see if xenU was working
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19:27	Surferdude	[root@plain root]# mount
19:27	Surferdude	/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
19:27	Surferdude	none on /proc type proc (rw)
19:27	Surferdude	none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
19:27	Surferdude	/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
19:27	Surferdude	none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
19:27	Surferdude	[root@plain root]#
19:28	knewt	ok. so you should be using root=/dev/hda3
19:30	_MarkW	Surferdude: this is all very interesting because your problem clearly isn't what I expected :-)
19:30	_MarkW	where did you get your XenLinux kernel from?
19:30	Surferdude	i got the prebuilt tarball from xen.sourceforge.net
19:31	_MarkW	ok, use the 2.4-xen0 kernel for now. just set your root=/dev/hda3 in the grub config like knewt said.
19:32	Surferdude	Ok
19:32	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
19:32	Surferdude	root(hd0,0)
19:32	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
19:32	Surferdude	module /vmlinuz-2.4-xen0 root=/dev/hda3 ro
19:33	Surferdude	I hope that works
19:33	_MarkW	Surferdude: looks good.
19:34	Surferdude	back to the serial input error
19:35	Surferdude	I think that has somthing to do with the kvm
19:36	_MarkW	do you actually have a serial line attached?
19:36	knewt	how far is it getting? is it erroring in grub? in xen? in linux?
19:36	Surferdude	yes its a serial kvm
19:36	Surferdude	its erroring a few seconds after i select it in grub
19:36	_MarkW	in Xen itself?
19:37	Surferdude	I am assuming so
19:37	_MarkW	what does the error say?
19:37	Surferdude	Somthing like "serial input error: press ctrl+a three times to enable serial access
19:37	Surferdude	tried doing that
19:37	Surferdude	just reboots
19:40	Surferdude	This is really stumping me :/
19:42	knewt	what processor do you have?
19:42	Surferdude	Intel Celeron
19:43	_MarkW	the ctrl+a thing is normally printed out when Xen starts
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19:43	Surferdude	yeah but it just reboots right after it shows
19:43	_MarkW	are you sure it's a serial error and not just the serial message interleaved with the real error?
19:44	Surferdude	I cant tell...
19:44	knewt	the normal message about ctrl-a is: "*** Serial input -> DOM0 (type 'CTRL-a' three times to switch input to Xen)."
19:44	Surferdude	thats
19:44	Surferdude	thats it
19:44	_MarkW	Surferdude: Yup that's normal.
19:44	_MarkW	So it's not the serial line that's the problem.
19:44	knewt	Surferdude: the lines immediately above that, do they mention loading domain 0?
19:45	_MarkW	Some bit of configuration must be out of place.
19:45	Surferdude	So what is O_o
19:45	_MarkW	If you put "noreboot" onto the Xen grub command line then it won't reboot automatically (you'll have to power cycle the box)
19:45	_MarkW	That way you can have a better look at the error.
19:47	Surferdude	thats when it boots right?
19:47	Surferdude	when i am @ the grub menu
19:47	_MarkW	you can press "e" on the Xen menu entry, then "e" to edit the "kernel xen.gz" line, then add it on.
19:47	knewt	yeah. needs to go on the "kernel" line
19:48	_MarkW	then press return, then b to boot.
19:51	Surferdude	Ok... just freezes at the serial input message
19:51	_MarkW	OK, that's weird. No visible error messages?
19:52	demon	the linux kernel needs to be told where to direct its console output, it'll want to output it to the local console, not serial...
19:52	_MarkW	demon: good point! :-)
19:52	demon	try appending 'console=ttyS0,[speed]' to the kernel command line
19:52	demon	also, do you have a line in inittab to spawn a getty on the serial port?
19:52	demon	MarkW: I've installed xen by wire on a few boxes :)
19:53	Surferdude	no other errors... adding the kernel arg now
19:53	demon	er, make sure you append that to the linux kernel's command line
19:53	_MarkW	Surferdude: stick "console=ttyS0" to the end of the vmlinuz line
19:53	demon	not the xen kernel's
19:53	_MarkW	works on my test box here
19:54	_MarkW	you needn't worry about the speed for that line, since Linux doesn't get to control it anyhow.
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19:55	Surferdude	same error...
19:55	demon	no further output?
19:55	demon	did you build the XenoLinux kernel yourself, or is it some kind of packaged kernel?
19:55	_MarkW	Surferdude: can you show us what your menu.lst entry currently looks linke?
19:56	Surferdude	Sure... give me a sec
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19:58	knewt	heh. looking over my menu.lst file reminds me of when i upgraded my dom0 and suddenly found that the initrd support had been fixed, and that my workaround to deal with the prior bug didn't work any more :/
19:58	Surferdude	What the hell... i cant even access ssh anymore
20:00	Surferdude	Crap... might as well get another 24 hours on the kvm
20:01		* riel hurts his head on more VM stuff
20:02	Surferdude	there isnt anything on menu.lst about xen
20:02	Surferdude	wait... nevermind
20:02	Surferdude	there is
20:03	_MarkW	riel: what you up to in the VM? the VFS is hurting my head right now...
20:03	Surferdude	heres the entry in menu.lst
20:03	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
20:03	Surferdude	root(hd0,0)
20:03	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
20:03	Surferdude	module /vmlinuz-2.4-xen0 root=/dev/hda3 ro
20:04	_MarkW	can you please stick "console=tty0 console=ttyS0" onto the end of that module line?
20:05	Surferdude	in menu.lst?
20:05	_MarkW	yeah, it'll need to be there so might as well add it permanently.
20:05	demon	Surferdude: did you build the XenoLinux kernel yourself, or is this some kind of packaged kernel you're using?
20:06	Surferdude	its prebuilt
20:06	Surferdude	title XenLinux 2.0.5
20:06	Surferdude	root(hd0,0)
20:06	Surferdude	kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072
20:06	Surferdude	module /vmlinuz-2.4-xen0 root=/dev/hda3 ro console=tty0
20:06	Surferdude	console-ttyS0
20:06	demon	okay... are you sure it supports your IDE controller and NIC?
20:06	demon	that should be console=ttyS0
20:06	demon	not console-ttyS0
20:07	demon	is there an initrd that came with that kernel, perhaps?
20:07	_MarkW	demon: if we can at least get some output on the serial line then we can figure out what it doesn't like.
20:07	_MarkW	i don't think it's using udev or anything like that so it shouldn't need an initrd.
20:07	Surferdude	ok... rebootinng
20:08	_MarkW	It's probably lacking the IDE controller driver, I guess.
20:09	riel	_MarkW: http://wiki.linux-mm.org/wiki/AdvancedPageReplacement
20:09	Surferdude	its...working!!!!
20:09	riel	_MarkW: I'm designing a Clock-Pro variation that can be implemented in the Linux VM
20:09	_MarkW	Surferdude: wicked!
20:10	_MarkW	we can all give ourselves a pat on the back :-)
20:10	demon	Surferdude: okay, now is it giving you any kind of error?
20:10	_MarkW	riel: arrrghhh you scary man :-)
20:10	Surferdude	Well... it gave me the warning aboout lib/tls
20:10	Surferdude	but the terminal still shows RHEL
20:10	riel	_MarkW: want me to forward you the patch I sent out friday ? ;)
20:10	demon	ok... that would seem to mean it's mounting the filsystem and spawning init
20:10	Surferdude	at the login prompt
20:10	_MarkW	Surferdude: OK, that's standard, just move /lib/tls out of the way so it won't get used.
20:11	riel	if you run Fedora, you want to keep /lib/tls
20:11	_MarkW	riel: I'd quite like to see the patch actually actually
20:11	Surferdude	I know that, but should i worry about it still saying RHEL?
20:11	riel	otherwise RPM database locking doesn't go right
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20:11	Surferdude	at the login prompt
20:11	Surferdude	?
20:11	demon	well, you're still running RHEL
20:11	riel	Surferdude: don't worry about it saying RHEL
20:11	demon	so yeah, that's normal
20:11	riel	_MarkW: what's your email address again ?
20:11	_MarkW	Surferdude: log in and play!
20:11	Surferdude	ok... good
20:11	Surferdude	datruesurfer@gmail.com
20:11	_MarkW	riel: mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk
20:12	Surferdude	wow... i am so excited that i forgot my root password for a second
20:12	_MarkW	Surferdude: you should be able to bring up some domains now :-) try the ttylinux example in the user manual for starters - it's nice and simple.
20:13	Surferdude	xend start brings up a whole lot of errors
20:13	Surferdude	:/
20:13	_MarkW	have you installed twisted?
20:13	Surferdude	yes
20:13	Surferdude	all python errors
20:13	riel	Surferdude: make sure to leave /lib/tls in place, if you value /var/lib/rpm/ ;)
20:14	knewt	eh. i didn't think the 2.4 kernel supported /lib/tls anyway?
20:14	_MarkW	Surferdude: OK, lets see the Python spew. It's probably something straightforward.
20:14	riel	knewt: RHEL3 does
20:14	knewt	aah
20:14	_MarkW	knewt: they don't but this is a RedHatMegaPatch 2.4 :-)
20:15	demon	probably just version warnings
20:15	riel	_MarkW: the reason of that patch (in RHL8 & 9) was to prepare userland for 2.6
20:15	Surferdude	import error: no module named logging
20:15	_MarkW	except - it's running a Xen 2.4 kernel now, so I'm not sure why it would be using TLS...
20:15	Surferdude	thats what it ends with
20:15	riel	_MarkW: it worked well enough, and there was enough customer demand, that it got included in RHEL3
20:15	_MarkW	Surferdude: ah, you'll be missing the python logging framework then
20:15	riel	_MarkW: good point
20:15	_MarkW	spooky...
20:15	Surferdude	how do i get that working?
20:16		* _MarkW scratches his head
20:16	_MarkW	what python version are you running?
20:18	Surferdude	Wont even let me see that :/
20:18	_MarkW	?
20:18	_MarkW	python --version
20:18	_MarkW	oops, no, that's not it...
20:19	_MarkW	python -V should tell you
20:19	Surferdude	2.2.3
20:20	_MarkW	Surferdude: you'll probably need to install the logging package as an add-on
20:20	_MarkW	it wasn't standard until 2.3
20:20	knewt	ok, i think it's time for me to grab some shuteye, a) it being gone 3am, and b) /me having got a good idea of how i'm going to code interleaving why i come to implement it
20:21	Surferdude	Where/how do i do that?
20:21	_MarkW	knewt: see ya.
20:21	_MarkW	Surferdude: i'm working on it...
20:21		* knewt & # ...off to see the wizard...
20:22	_MarkW	Surferdude: wget http://www.red-dove.com/logging-0.4.9.5.tar.gz
20:22	_MarkW	tar xzf logging-0.4.9.5.tar.gz
20:22	_MarkW	cd logging-0.4.9.5
20:22	_MarkW	python setup.py install
20:24	Surferdude	host not found
20:24	_MarkW	ifconfig
20:24	_MarkW	see if eth0 appears
20:24	Surferdude	nope
20:25	Surferdude	ifconfig eth0?
20:25	_MarkW	you're missing the driver for your network card
20:25	_MarkW	you'll need to build a new kernel with support for your network
20:25	_MarkW	if you don't want to do that just yet then you could just reboot into vanilla linux to do the download
20:28	_MarkW	riel: is anybody actively working on the compressed caching project?
20:28	_MarkW	i always thought it looked quite cool but couldn't see any obvious signs of life on the website.
20:30	Surferdude	Looks like I have to go on a download hunt
20:30	riel	_MarkW: not lately afaik
20:30	riel	_MarkW: and yes, compressed caching looks very promising
20:31	_MarkW	does any OS use it presently?
20:31	riel	not afaik
20:32	_MarkW	yawn
20:32	_MarkW	Time for me to go to bed!
20:32	_MarkW	Surferdude: good luck with setting things up. I'll probably be back around the same time tomorrow.
20:33	Surferdude	Later... thanks for your help
20:33	_MarkW	riel: thanks for the links / code - I'll check it out when I'm more awake ;-)
20:33		* _MarkW goes
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---	Log	closed Sun May 01 00:00:35 2005