After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and includes pvops, 5 years after my last post on Fedora-Xen, I'm back. I've been running Xen on a home server for well, just over 5 years, the last three of which have been on a Centos5 dom0, in the absence of dom0 support in Fedora since FC6.
I've installed a fresh machine, and can get a dom0 running in Fedora 15 using 2.6.40 and the default xen-4.1.1 packages, as well as DomU's running Centos5, Scientific Linux 6, Fedora 15 and Solaris 11, so all good there.
But I've hit a snag. The Fedora kernel doesn't appear to include the xen-pciback kernel module (or indeed any module with "pciback" in its name). I use PCI Passthrough to donate a physical NIC to one of the domU's which runs the network gateway/firewall/transparent proxy etc. for the network.
I've grabbed the kernel source rpm and checked out the config files, and they appear to be completely missing the XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND flags.
Being new to Fedora 15, Kernel 3 and Xen4.x all at once, is there some new trick that isn't documented online, or am I right in seeing a lack of PCI pass-through support in the Fedora kernel?
My next step is to try adding the compile flags to the .config and rebuilding the kernel - but would appreciate anyone's input with more experience of the Fedora environment.
Thanks,
Hilton.
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Day xlot@onlinewarrior.com wrote:
After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
Quoting http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0 " Current status
Targeted release: Fedora 16 Last updated: 2010-07-24 Percentage of completion: 75%
In order to implement this feature, it is necessary to get full Xen Dom0 support upstream and in Fedora. The core Dom0 support has been accepted upstream and was released in Linux 2.6.37. Linux 2.6.39 brought support for the Xen network backend driver. Linux 3.0 brought the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver (for pci passthru). "
hth, jerry
On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Dayxlot@onlinewarrior.com wrote:
After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver (for pci passthru).
Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so as usual RTFM saves the day.
Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its progress with interest. Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it into F16. I was already running libvirt-0.9.0.f16 on my F15 box (rebuilt from SRPM), and if pciback makes it into 3.1 in time, F16 will finally be the killer (supported) dom0 solution I've been waiting for since FC6.
Cheers,
Hilton. -Sydney, Oz.
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Hilton Day xlot@onlinewarrior.com wrote:
On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Dayxlot@onlinewarrior.com wrote:
After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver (for pci passthru).
Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so as usual RTFM saves the day.
Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its progress with interest. Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it into F16. I was already running libvirt-0.9.0.f16 on my F15 box (rebuilt from SRPM), and if pciback makes it into 3.1 in time, F16 will finally be the killer (supported) dom0 solution I've been waiting for since FC6.
Amen to that. I don't know if the problems were political or technical or both, but Xen really got screwed from our point of view. The majority of hardware on Earth is currently *not* capable of full virtualization, but commit to it anyway. Hmm.
jerry
On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Hilton Day wrote:
Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its progress with interest. Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it into F16.
It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41 kernel once 3.1 has proved itself in F16.
Michael Young
It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41 kernel once 3.1 has proved itself in F16.
Do you mean "yum update" installs 3.1.0-rc3 (?) on F16 ? 3.0 doesn't have pci-backend.
Boris.
--- On Thu, 8/25/11, M A Young m.a.young@durham.ac.uk wrote:
From: M A Young m.a.young@durham.ac.uk Subject: Re: [Fedora-xen] F15 kernel Xen support missing PCI passthrough? To: "Hilton Day" xlot@onlinewarrior.com Cc: xen@lists.fedoraproject.org Date: Thursday, August 25, 2011, 4:25 AM
On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Hilton Day wrote:
Looks like F15 won't work for me - no worries as its just a test build for replacement of the actual server at some undetermined future date.
I'm installing F16 rawhide on a spare machine and will follow its progress with interest. Given 3.1 is in RC phase, it may yet make it into F16.
It has already reached F16. There is also talk of an F15 2.6.41 kernel once 3.1 has proved itself in F16.
Michael Young -- xen mailing list xen@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen
On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 02:16:30PM +1000, Hilton Day wrote:
On 25/08/2011 12:47 PM, Jerry Amundson wrote:
On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Hilton Dayxlot@onlinewarrior.com wrote:
After recently discovering 2.6.40 is secretly Kernel 3 in disguise, and
the block backend driver. Linux 3.1 will bring the pci backend driver (for pci passthru).
Thanks Jerry - I saw the page but missed the comment on "passthru", so as usual RTFM saves the day.
It's also good to monitor the "upstream" Xen pvops status page at: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps
-- Pasi