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===== Week 12 [ Mon 9 Aug 2010 - Sun 15 Aug 2010 ] ===== ==== Day 1 [ Mon 9 Aug 2010 ] ==== So today was the day of the first Xen tests. Even though my laptop's keyboard didn't work with the Xen kernel, I figured that was a minor driver issue and if I get it to reach the login screen with gPXE, then it's okay. I realised then that the desktop was not configured as a boot server: no dhcp and no tftp servers. I only used it before for the forcedeth NIC and the laptop was the one with the dhcp and tftp servers. The roles were now reversed. The reason why I didn't keep the previous configuration is because Xen on my desktop gave an error related to a firmware bug, related to an ACPI, along with a message that I should upgrade my BIOS. So I proceeded in installing and configuring the servers on the desktop PC which took a while because of my uberl33t admin skillz. After the setup was complete, I used ye old booting stick, containing a gPXE image with the b44 driver for the laptop's NIC. Well, we're sorry but the princess is in another castle :) Apparently, b44 NICs have limited number of address pins so they're not able to access addresses above 1GB. My laptop has 2GB of RAM :( I looked through the driver and even commented the >1GB check to see if perhaps it works but unfortunately it doesn't. Perhaps I shall look into this another time. Meanwhile, I got a _new_ laptop these days and I was wondering if Xen would work on it. While configuring stuff on the PC this question kept bugging me. So, I went on and installed stuff on the new laptop, recompiled Xen, recompiled a dom0 kernel, initrd, modified GRUB and booted it. It reached the login screen, keyboard works (yay for improvements) but I didn't test Xen specific commands. I was now curious if gPXE would work with the r8169 NIC the new laptop has. Luckily it did, and I was able to fetch some dummy images. Eventually, I fetched the xen hypervisor along with a dom0 linux image. The initrd had a size of 66M and after all the installing and apt-getting and whatnot I was tired of waiting. <code C> imgfetch xen-4.0.1 imgfetch vmlinuz imgload xen-4.0.1 imgload vmlinuz imgexec vmlinuz </code> Amazingly enough, the hypervisor booted and even fetched the vmlinuz image (I am not sure how this happened since I didn't give any specific commands for this), and the Linux kernel froze because it didn't know how to fetch the root (because I didn't pass it any root= argument like in GRUB). At this point, I was happy with today's progress, hopefully everything will fully work soon.
