Bug 155924

Summary: Booting a domU with a kernel / initrd from domU image file doesn't work
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Tob Sch <Tob_Sch>
Component: XenAssignee: Clyde Griffin <cgriffin>
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: SuSE Linux 10.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Tob Sch 2006-03-07 21:45:04 UTC 
Hi,

I'm not sure, if this is a common feature lack of xen 3.0, but I'm not able to start a domU domain by booting a kernel / initrd from a path within the domU image file (disk = [ 'file:... ]).

It's only possible to start domU domains from a path within the dom0 directory tree.

This is long winded, because when I do a kernel upgrade or kernel changes (e.g.  mkinitrd after modifying the parameter INITRD_MODULES in the file /etc/sysconfig/kernel) within a domU domain, I must not forget to mount the domU image file within domain dom0 and copy the new kernel / initrd files to the dom0 path configured in the xen dumU configuration file for the parameters "kernel" and "ramdisk".

I think, that there is a need for separate kernel / initd files for each domU domain (e.g. because dom1 could have got a xfs image file for root, dom2 could have got reiserfs image file for root, ...), which is automatically updated when the kernel is changed within a domU.

Thanks in advance.
Comment 1 Charles Coffing 2006-03-08 19:14:00 UTC 
Indeed.  This is done by using domUloader (or some people prefer pygrub, but that doesn't support reiserfs last time I checked, so we're using domUloader.)  Look in /etc/xen/xmexample.domUloader for a sample setup (or in older builds, that file was called /etc/xen/xen-domUloader, I think.)