An engineer's life around Kyoto

Another short story of Xen. Since Xen 4.1, a new command line tool "xl" is introduced. According to the wiki page on xl of wiki.xen.org, xl will take place of xend toolstack. Because PCI passthru and VGA passthru information is richer with xl than xm in the Internet, I became interested in xl. So, I have tried several times to use xl to create domU under my Xen 4.1 environment. But "xen create " subcommand wouldn't bring up a domU virtual machine. Finally, I gave up with Xen 4.1 of wheezy and tried xl in Xen 4.3 of jessie. Just adding device_model and device_model_override item in the domU's configuration file, domU virtual machine brought up. I wonder this might be one of the reasons the xl toolstack is not default of Xen 4.1. If you dare to use xl in Debian GNU/Linux, install Xen packages and add the following line in /etc/default/xen : TOOLSTACK=xl Note: virsh does not seem to work with xl, as far as I tried in my wheezy box.

My laptop PC is fairly old and running Debian wheezy. Though it's not powerful, I am trying to run Xen 4.1. At my first trial, Xen dom0 kernel itself launched without a trouble, but just after the X server started the display was filled with textual black and white patterns and lost reaction to keyboard and mouse input. I got disappointed and kept away from Xen for a while. Today, I tried again Xen 4.1 following the "Google Teacher"'s work around for some kinds of Intel's integrated video controller. Before launching dom0, I added the following setting to /etc/X11/xorg.conf: Section "Device"         Identifier "myvideodevice"         Driver "intel"         Option "AccelMethod" "sna" EndSection After I checked that the setting is actually effective by restarting X server and looking into X server's log messages,  I reboot the system and launched dom0. As before, th...

A few weeks ago, I upgraded one of my Debian box from squeeze to wheezy. Upgrading task was not so difficult, also I had to manage a trouble concerned with X11. Then I tried running Xen dom0 kernel upon the Xen hypervisor 4.1. After the installation I booted the hypervisor followed by the dom0 kernel. When a X server launched, the screen was filled with the textile-like tiling patterns. But after several seconds, the normal GDM login console appeared. I did some tasks in the desktop environment, for example, watching a video stream. During the tasks, I encountered one Xserver's crash and one kernel panic. The thing around Xen and xorg's Intel driver must be getting better. But it seems to be still unstable.

I recently tried to set up Xen on my Squeeze box, with intel 945GM graphics controller. I followed the instruction on Xen - Debian Wiki . I installed the Xen hypervisor, kernel, xen-tools and other stuff, then created a domU image of Ubuntu natty. After that, I rebooted the system. But when X server was about to be launched, the screen became black out,  both keyboard and mouse don't work anymore. I reread the article on the wiki, and figured out the Xorg driver for Intel graphics controller  is suspicious. So, I changed the Xorg driver 'intel' to 'fbdev' wrting /etc/X11/xorg.conf , and rebooted.  This workaround works out! The drawback of the workaround is, 'intel' driver specific features, including DRI and XvMC, are disabled.