Xen packages and kernels for SUSE Linux
Intro
Xen
is an exciting new project from the University of Cambridge that allows
you to run multiple instances of Linux on a standard x86 (PPro/K7 and up)
PC. You boot the Xen hypervisor and the (privileged) domain 0 Linux
kernel and you're able to start additional domains.
The Linux kernel needs changes to run on top of Xen, mainly to
enhance performance, but also to circumvent some of the shortcomings
of x86 CPUs to be virtualizable. To get Xen running, you thus need
to install the xen and the kernel-xen RPMs (see below). The kernel
is based on the kernel for the respective distribution, e.g. 2.6.9rc2
for SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional.
It is advisable to install one of the documentation packages as well
and to read the instructions in
/usr/share/doc/packages/xen/README.SuSE.
Download
Note:
The latest packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 or later are NOT here,
but are published at Novell forge on the Xen pages at
http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?xenpreview.
The quality of the Xen3 packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 there is much better
then what was contained in our original release; the code has significantly
matured during the last months. It works really stable
on x86; on x86-64 there remains a few issues (as of mid Jan 2006).
Find here older RPMs or packages for older versions of
SuSE Linux.
Links to raw directories:
Notes
- You can run the 2.6.11 kernel under SL92 just fine.
-
SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional does contain all the needed
python packages to run Xen already.
- IDE is now modularized since 2.6.11rc3. Please put the modules
ide-disk and a chipset specific driver (like piix) into your initrd.
(Add it to INITRD_MODULES in /etc/sysconfig/kernel.)
Avoid ide-generic or you'll be unable to use DMA.
- Installing the 2.6.11 kernels will ask for mkinitrd-1.2.
You can ignore this with --nodeps
- Sources and additional packages can be found in the subdirectories
that contain the RPMs.
- There is only one kernel flavour for Xen. You can use it both
for domain 0 and for unprivileged domains; the largest difference
are the drivers and these are modular ...
Images
A collection of images of paravirtualized guests can be found in
the images directory.
These are just provided for testing in no way official images.
domUloader
Two patches against Xen-3.0.2, the domUloader.py script (to be put
in /usr/lib/xen/boot/ and a config file example with
extensive help text are contained here.
xen hotplug scripts
Scripts you can drop in /etc/xen/scripts/ to be able to
handle additional storage types or networking modes are found
here.
Disclaimer
These RPMs are not official part of SUSE Linux. They are provided
by me for convenience to
SUSE Linux users.
The packages are thus
signed with
my private GnuPG key and not the official SUSE build key.
Please apply the same care that you'd use when installing an
experimental kernel. Though it never did in our tests, the
kernel might eat your data; so be advised that there's no
warranty in any way.
Feedback
Please report problems with packaging to me. Please report
problems with Xen back to the
xen-devel
mailing list.
(w) Kurt Garloff, 2005-02-13.