Posts made by keeely

You start your post with the word 'untrue' Although I'm not sure what that's in response to. You then go on to state that my last statement is untrue. I presume there you are talking about the line:

"Unfortunately this means there is no free way for me to run XCP-ng except bare metal"

I stand by that statement. If you're telling me I can, in fact run XCP-ng (to experiment with it) if only I'll just install XCP-ng first then I don't actually need to run anything nested in the first place, I just wipe my desktop OS and put XCP-ng on. That is simply not an option (for me). Note that I said 'for me' in the above line. I'm surprised you'd say that's untrue.

I tested my VBox setup with Proxmox and it worked fine. So it should be capable of running nested hypervisors. I wonder what Xen does that's different.

Unfortunately this means there is no free way for me to run XCP-ng except bare metal

It completed with VMWare Fusion now, just took way longer than it did before for some reason. I need to be more patient.

I tried on VMWare Fusion, which worked before. It doesn't work there either. I used the same Fusion settings, the same XCP-ng ISO xcp-ng-8.1.0-2.iso.

I connected to the http web interface on port 80 to deploy XO this time.

BTW I would post a screenshot of what I'm seeing, however for the last few days this forum has given an error when I try to do so:

ERROR

Something went wrong installing the "sharp" module /lib64/libz.so.1 version ZLIB_1.2.9' not found (required by /usr/share/nginx/html/forum/node_modules/sharp
- Remove the "node_modules/sharp" directory then run npm install --ignore-scripts=false --verbose" and look for errors - Consult the installation documentation at https://sharp.pixelplumbing/com/install - Search for this error at https://github.com/lovell/sharp/issues

The above error appears in red in the bottom right corner of the screen in a toaster message, it fades after a few seconds.
(I may have made a mistake with the above because I'm typing it from a screenshot).

As I said, this only happened since last week.

@olivierlambert Good point. I definitely did check the box for nested virt. I will try again from scratch with VMWare Fusion where it worked before.

The first time I tried this it worked (once I'd worked around certificate problems). Now I've tried it again yesterday on a completely different setup, with latest XCP-ng running under VirtualBox instead of VMWare but I just get the spinner forever. When I checked the XCP-ng console with xe vm-list it shows that the VM has been created. What are the steps to trouble-shoot this process please?

thanks!

It seems I got a kernel panic for some other reason with 5.4.21. It's all working now, thanks.

@r1 I haven't done a 'make oldconfig' using the 4.4.14 kernel config, which would obviously be the next step. There's a long time-period between those two kernels unfortunately, a lot could have changed. The config options in the kernel are somewhat different.

There is no need to use initrd, and I finally have this booting with kernel 4.4.14 and optimised IO.

Here are the kernel options I used:

# cat .config | grep XEN
CONFIG_XEN=y
CONFIG_XEN_DOM0=y
CONFIG_XEN_PVHVM=y
CONFIG_XEN_512GB=y
CONFIG_XEN_SAVE_RESTORE=y
# CONFIG_XEN_DEBUG_FS is not set
# CONFIG_XEN_PVH is not set
CONFIG_PCI_XEN=y
CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND=y
# CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_BACKEND is not set
CONFIG_XEN_SCSI_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_NETXEN_NIC=m
CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_FRONTEND=y
# CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_BACKEND is not set
CONFIG_INPUT_XEN_KBDDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_HVC_XEN=y
CONFIG_HVC_XEN_FRONTEND=y
# CONFIG_TCG_XEN is not set
# CONFIG_XEN_WDT is not set
CONFIG_XEN_FBDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON=y
# CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON_MEMORY_HOTPLUG is not set
CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES=y
CONFIG_XEN_DEV_EVTCHN=y
CONFIG_XEN_BACKEND=y
CONFIG_XENFS=y
CONFIG_XEN_COMPAT_XENFS=y
CONFIG_XEN_SYS_HYPERVISOR=y
CONFIG_XEN_XENBUS_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_GNTDEV=m
CONFIG_XEN_GRANT_DEV_ALLOC=m
CONFIG_SWIOTLB_XEN=y
CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND=m
# CONFIG_XEN_SCSI_BACKEND is not set
CONFIG_XEN_PRIVCMD=y
CONFIG_XEN_ACPI_PROCESSOR=m
# CONFIG_XEN_MCE_LOG is not set
CONFIG_XEN_HAVE_PVMMU=y
CONFIG_XEN_EFI=y
CONFIG_XEN_AUTO_XLATE=y
CONFIG_XEN_ACPI=y
CONFIG_XEN_SYMS=y
CONFIG_XEN_HAVE_VPMU=y

XCP-ng Center reports IO Optimised.
XOA still reports the VM as HVM.

I can finally see the /dev/xvda device inside the guest however.

@r1 That's very useful info. I will try to make initrd.

@r1 said in /dev/xvda not appearing in guest:

Can you try and compile it with "M" and push them in initrd?

I have been avoiding this due to the insane amount of time it takes to do the full module compile using nested virtualisation (Slackware under XCP-ng under VMWare Fusion). But assuming that I do do it, why do I need initrd? Can't I just boot using /dev/sda1, and load the vbd frontend driver after boot? Won't both those devices still be present?

@keeely Looking at the XOA appliance, it does seem to have the right mode:

Shame there is no /proc/config.gz on that VM so I can lift the kernel config.

@olivierlambert I found only this under advanced:

Also under general section for the VM:

So what does that mean? HVM? If so where is the PVHVM option?

Interestingly under disks, I see this:

So the device is listed as xvda, however dmesg in the guest shows sda has been detected.

That was for VM.

@r1 The default distro does work, however I had to compile in support for rtl8139 C+ to get networking to work because the usual rtl 8139 driver did not work.

<*>     RealTek RTL-8139 C+ PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support.    # <==== needed this one
<*>     RealTek RTL-8129/8130/8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support  

My VM is I believe HVM, however this is not all that easy to determine. I'm using XCP-ng Center and the only page that comes close to giving me an option is this one (General -> Properties):

I don't believe the virtual machine is presenting to me anything other than straight HVM hardware, because I'm sure I would have seen something in dmesg about the detection of the Xen bus at least.

The only guide to kernel configs that I've seen is here:
https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Mainline_Linux_Kernel_Configs

I'm broadly following that, however it seems to be a little out of date.

I would like to find a page like that, but with one page per virtualisation mode, e.g. kernel options for each of the following cases:

HVM
HVM + PV Drivers
PVHVM
PVH
PV

After searching for some time I've been unable to find that information.

I should probably be a bit more specific about my kernel config:

# cat .config | grep XEN
CONFIG_XEN=y
# CONFIG_XEN_PV is not set
# CONFIG_XEN_PVHVM is not set
CONFIG_XEN_SAVE_RESTORE=y
# CONFIG_XEN_DEBUG_FS is not set
CONFIG_PCI_XEN=y
# CONFIG_NET_9P_XEN is not set
CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_SCSI_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_NETXEN_NIC=m
CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_INPUT_XEN_KBDDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_HVC_XEN=y
CONFIG_HVC_XEN_FRONTEND=y
# CONFIG_TCG_XEN is not set
# CONFIG_XEN_WDT is not set
# CONFIG_DRM_XEN is not set
CONFIG_XEN_FBDEV_FRONTEND=y
# CONFIG_SND_XEN_FRONTEND is not set
CONFIG_MMC_SDHCI_XENON=m
CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON=y
# CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON_MEMORY_HOTPLUG is not set
CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_XEN_DEV_EVTCHN=y
# CONFIG_XEN_BACKEND is not set
CONFIG_XENFS=y
CONFIG_XEN_COMPAT_XENFS=y
CONFIG_XEN_SYS_HYPERVISOR=y
CONFIG_XEN_XENBUS_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_GNTDEV=m
CONFIG_XEN_GRANT_DEV_ALLOC=m
# CONFIG_XEN_GRANT_DMA_ALLOC is not set
CONFIG_SWIOTLB_XEN=y
# CONFIG_XEN_PVCALLS_FRONTEND is not set
CONFIG_XEN_PRIVCMD=y
CONFIG_XEN_EFI=y
CONFIG_XEN_ACPI=y

@olivierlambert I compiled my own kernel v5.4.21, and included the PV stuff. I definitely included Xen virtual block device support (compiled in, not a module), CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND. I thought that was all I should need. The distro is Slackware. Thanks.

The /dev/xvda device node is not appearing in my guest. How do I trouble-shoot this please?
/sys/bus/xen/drivers/vbd exists on dom0. There is nothing in /sys/bus/xen/drivers/ or /sys/bus/xen/devices/ on my domU.

thanks!