xVM Windows XP Hosts

I'm still playing around with xVM under build 76 of solaris though as I type build 77 is out to the general public.
I bought some more memory for my system to take it to 4GB to give me some head room to play with domUs, ZFS and SunRay only to find that my BIOS doesn't properly support 4GB. Currently the OS can only talk to 2900 or so MB - the rest has been appropriated by the BIOS. Now of course this being a 64bit OS the 32bit limitations don't apply - unfortunately the BIOS has no memory remap option for 64bit aware OSs I think the chipset does support it as far as I can tell but it looks like ASUS have not implemented it in the V3-P5945G BIOS - most annoying. I've ordered a new mainboard which should do the trick(at least if the BIOS manual I read is to be believed) When that turns up I will reinstall with build 77 - I'm hoping that my problems with biosdev might go away - but I'm not convinced.

Mainly I followed this guide for setting up my HVM domU but with a couple of bits and bobs I have gleaned from the very useful xvm-discuss@sun.com mailing list and the Release Notes have helped me get my XP domU up and running.

6612343
Setting:
set softcall_delay=0x100000
in /etc/system

and

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend setprop config/default-nic="e1000g0"
root@frank / $ svcadm refresh xvm/xend
root@frank / $ svcadm restart xvm/xend

To confirm:

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend listprop |grep default
config/default-nic astring e1000g0


to make sure it gets the correct network card (I now have two physical cards instead of two vlans to one card after working around my SunRay latency issue)

I also put this in my .hvm file to bridge the interface.

vif = ['mac=0:1b:21:4:b9:1, bridge=e1000g0']

Running the domain
root@frank xVM $ xm create windows-xVM.hmv

Then just vnc to the console, annoyingly Apples screen sharing vnc application doesn't work for connecting to the console session of a dom. Though this is almost definitely a limitation of the client not the server, as most other clients seem to work fine. On the Mac JollyFast VNC seems to be the best free client, vineViewer was a bit nicer but isn't free. vncviewer on Solaris works well as does xtightvncviewer on Ubuntu.

The install was not without some hitches - seemed to hang up and if I didn't have the vnc session open when it prompted for input the domain would get blocked, and I couldn't get back onto the vnc session. Installaition did take a while longer than expected as well.

I'm going to try and dig out some windows server disks at some point as well and give them a go to so I will try and monitor the performance more closely issues then.

xVM Solaris and how I can break stuff.

My forays into xVM (xen for OpenSolaris) in build 75 of OpenSolaris are causing me one or two minor issues.

Firstly I hit:

* 6616311 Live upgrade does not add entry for xvm in grub menu.

There is no xVM entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Workaround:

Run bootadm -m upgrade and reboot the system.

Looks like live upgrade doesn't quite do all the bits needed for xVM just yet.
Unfortunately this didn't work for me, and I ended up having to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to add the following entry's:
title Solaris75a on xVM
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/uni
x
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title Solaris75a on xVM - via serial console shared
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz console=com1 com1=9600,8n1
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/uni
x -B console=hypervisor
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title 32-bit Solaris75a on xVM
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel /boot/xen.gz
module /platform/i86xpv/kernel/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/unix
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

Though it took me far to long to work out that I had forgotten the root(hd2,0,a) lines the first time.

After that I added:
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal --timeout=2 serial console

to enable me to select the grub menu option down a serial line (connected to a wrt54g - which is part of my Final Year Project)

The system booted into xVM with a shared serial console with Solaris.

I attempted to create a DomU instance of Windows2003 using a zfs raw disk however during the process the system appeared to lock up hard, I didn't have the serial line attached at the time of the lockup so have no idea what actually whent on - suffice to say it fell of the network and wasn't repsonding to the console (serial and/or keyboard and monitor).

After a while I got board of waiting and reset the box (I get impatient like that) - it seemed to come back up ok - but now whenever it boots it seems to panic when loading dtterm (this box is also a sunray server). I can get it to boot into plain build 75 but whenever I attempt to use the xVM menu it panics again.

I'm not entirely sure if I have mangled something by hard powering the system off or not but for the moment I'm going to boot back to my old build 64 BE and create a new BE based on that and attempt to try again - annoyingly ZFS has been upgraded since build 64 so I can't get to my home dir.

At this point I fiddled fruitlessly for a while before attempting a reinstall only to have the what appears to be the same problem - panic when it gets to the graphical login.

So on the new install I tried disabling graphical login in - as it always seemed to fall over at that point - I also edited grub to give me serial console again (don't forger to remove the splash screen option)

I can now boot into xVM with solaris as Dom0 - but no graphics

I've just come back to this after a while (now on a clean install of build 76) and have located the source of the panics under xVM when xorg loaded it appears to be issues with the shared memory of the intel 950 GMA. This was only located with a bit of help from opensolaris forums and one very helpful mrj at Sun its bug 6624364.
I'm working around the issue by using an ancient ATI card - I only have a head for occasional debugging purposes as I use the serial line for remote access but this being x86 it needs graphics of some sort to boot It's a sunray server I need so I do need x to load - maybe you can configure xorg not to come up on the console and only for use on sunray sessions but I don't know how.

But the long and the short of it is I've booted windows in a domU HVM using xVM.

I've been using zfs raw images for the disk though as I havn't got it installed yet I haven't been able to experiment with ZFS snapshots for rolling back purposes.

The problem is of course that I can't find any Windows MSDN CDs or iso images that my Uni kindly supplies me with to go with the MSDN license keys I have! still the ISOs I do have boot and I can get to the stage of entering license keys.

At some point I intend to try putting a Linux domU on as well - its just a matter of finding the time.