MDLog:/sysadmin

The Journal Of A Linux Sysadmin

Lenny domU Xencons

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Even though at some point it looked like debian lenny will not have full xen support (for the 2.6.26 amd64 kernel) in the end this was fixed and lenny supports fully Xen ever on amd64. Upgrading from 2.6.18 to 2.6.26 is very straightforward (though we were using xen-hypervisor 3.2-1 already) and the only problem noticed was that the console on the domU machines was no longer working: it was showing the output correctly, but you could not enter anything on the console.

This is caused by the ‘new Xen console’ (xen now uses hvc0 for its console) and to fix it you have to add to your virtual machine xen configuration file one line: extra = “console=hvc0 xencons=tty”, restart the vm and it should be fine. In /etc/xen/.cfg add this line:

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extra = "console=hvc0 xencons=tty"

If you are using pygrub then in grub.conf on the domU add: console=hvc0 xencons=tty to the kernel line, like:

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kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 ro root=/dev/sda1 console=hvc0 xencons=tty

Here are the xen packages lenny uses:

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ii  libxenstore3.0                          3.2.1-2                    Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii  linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-amd64          2.6.26-13                  Linux 2.6.26 image on AMD64, oldstyle Xen su
ii  linux-modules-2.6.26-1-xen-amd64        2.6.26-13                  Linux 2.6.26 modules on AMD64
ii  xen-hypervisor-3.2-1-amd64              3.2.1-2                    The Xen Hypervisor on AMD64
ii  xen-tools                               3.9-4                      Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii  xen-utils-3.2-1                         3.2.1-2                    XEN administrative tools
ii  xen-utils-common                        3.2.0-2                    XEN administrative tools - common files
ii  xenstore-utils                          3.2.1-2                    Xenstore utilities for Xen

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