After mucking about with various combinations of grub2, xen and eucalyptus on Ubuntu Karmic and eventually Debian Squeeze I now have a working cloud computing sandbox using binaries entirely from debian packages.
The final configuration is a Debian Squeeze instance on my HP dv7z laptop running standard grub2, xen and eucalyptus packages. The kernel is 2.6.31.6 with dom0 pv_ops. In addition to the observations below, there are some insights as to what is going on in the Xen world in Jeremy Fitzhardinge’s Xen Summit presentation.
My observations in attempting to find a packaged working configuration are:
- Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid do not support xen dom0 kernels yet, but do have the Xen 3.3.1 hypervisor available
- Debian Squeeze has the Xen 3.4 Hypervisor, however has a dom0 kernel that does not support built in kernel command line for x86 (2.6.26) required for Xen+Grub2, so cannot work around current Xen/Grub 2 booting issues
- Eucalyptus 1.6.1 is supported with package repositories for Ubuntu Jaunty and Debian Squeeze, and not Ubuntu Karmic or Debian Lenny
In the end, I installed Squeeze and installed the xen, grub and eucalyptus packages. I was able to build the dom0 kernel using kernel-package from Jeremy Fitzhardinge’s git tree. This is a 2.6.31.6 kernel that supports the required built-in command line, can be debianized by kernel-package and is actually pv_ops, which is the new default/development focus for >=Xen3.4.
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jeremy/xen.git linux-2.6-xen
I’ll stick some more details in here once I have played around a bit. The only catch was loading the xen modules (fs,event,frontendprobe), as I am used to having them built in. Otherwise xend startup fails with a mysterious connection error message.
