Distros

LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS: WHAT TO TEST AFTER PACKAGING

mkinitrd, mkinitramfs and dracut

mkinitrd, mkinitramfs or dracut should be able to generate bootloader entries for Xen, see this page for an example.

Dom0 support in Linux

The Linux kernel packaged with the distribution should be compiled with Xen support, see this page. Booting the machine with Xen and the default kernel should complete successfully.

init scripts: xencommons

Xen relies on an init script called xencommons to initialize all the services. It should be executed by default at boot time.

qemu-xen-traditional and qemu-xen

The two device model binaries Xen relies on should be installed in the location where Xl expect them to be, that by default is /usr/lib/xen/bin, and can be changed modifying tools/libxl/_libxl_paths.h.

Xen udev scripts

The Xen udev scripts should be installed correctly, see /etc/udev/rules.d/xen-backend.rules: after manually creating the default bridge named xenbr0, starting a guest with a vif, the vif should be added to the bridge automatically.

External Links

patch to reduce spurious Xen entries in grub menu

LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS: SUGGESTED CONFIGURATIONS

LVM

Setting up lvm is strongly suggested: storing raw disk images in lvm volumes is the fastest possible configuration as you can exploit the in-kernel disk backend (CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_BACKEND in the Linux kernel config).

Then you can use:

  disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vol0/lvm_volume0,xvda,w' ]

in your VM config file.