In older versions of Xemn, each DomU could effectively use the system time of the Dom0. That was remove after Xen 4 or so. In versions after that issues of clock drift need to be addressed. I was investigating this and came across a discussion of best practices about setting the Limux clocksource on DomU’s. …
This used to be a bigger issue but now thanks to the signed drivers there’s very little more to do than download the drivers in Windows and install them: Latest Xen PV Drivers
First install build dependencies. This list may not be complete as some necessary libraries and tools may have already been installed on my test machines. This is what I used to get the packages to build successfully: apt-get install build-essential python-dev gettext bin86 bcc iasl uuid-dev libncurses5-dev pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libyajl-dev git gcc-multilib texinfo fakeroot Then download, …
Continue reading ‘Building xen-4.2.1 packages on Ubuntu 12.04’ »
I’ve done this enough times to know it by heart but I remember when I tried to find documentation on this step I ran into countless inaccurate and outdated examples. So here’s what I do to get the Windows GPL PV drivers installed under Xen. Download the drivers from meadowcourt.org. As of 1/18/2012 the latest …
Continue reading ‘Installing Windows GPLPV Drivers in Xen’ »
I’ve been wanting to explore the OS-level virtualization space again. For a long time I was running linux-verser on a number of servers. I switched to Xen because I really like the aesthetic of being able to run each virtual machine with it’s own kernel. But I wonder if this is not too heavy a …
Packages can be found here: https://launchpad.net/~agent-8131/+archive/ppa/+packages Design goals: packages created for xen 4.0.1 and xen 4.1.0 packages mirror install of xen as closely as possible currently only hypervisor and utils are included (make xen and make tools) no rc.d scripts setup, that’s left to user should be installable and functional on Debian and Ubuntu and …
Continue reading ‘Xen 4.0 and 4.1 packages for Ubuntu and Debian’ »
I’m not an expert at Debian packaging but I’ve been gotten tired of building Xen on every systems and losing the advantages that packaging brings like tracking file conflicts. So I decided to try and package Xen though I have had no luck so far. I am making slow but steady progress. I wanted to …
I took a development box running Xen 3.3 on Ubuntu 8.04 and upgraded in to Ubuntu 10.04 and installed Xen 4.1.0 from source. I still believe Xen is the best open source virtualization solution. At some point I’ll have to write up my experiments testing KVM + libvirt but suffice if to say the performance …
I’ve decided to expand this post a bit as I’ve run into a lot more problems. I think I will try evaluating XCP 1.0. Hard to imagine it being worse than Xen on Debian.
I’ve been feeling less than thrilled with the open source virtualization alternatives available. It’s not that I am not grateful for all the hard work people have put into these systems. I am increasingly finding the platforms to be buggy. I’m trying to decide on what the best setup is moving forward. Just thought I …
Continue reading ‘Open Source Virtualization – thoughts on the state of various alternatives’ »