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. If a user installs Xen dom0 packages, then the default boot entry should be changed to one that brings up the Xen kernel and dom0 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. See this page for more informations about the storage options available.

Tuning

You can find a list of tuning parameters here.

Linux Kernel Config Options

The following document contains a a list of Xen Related Linux Kernel Config Options

LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS: USER EXPERIENCE

Meta packages

For convenience, a Xen meta-package should be provided that contains the hypervisor, the xen tools and documentation.

Installation

The basic flow of Xen installation should be:

• Install distro;
• Install Xen packages or the Xen meta-package (as part of this the bootloader entries would be updated);
• Update-grub (or equivalent);
• Reboot, and you are ready to go.

Man pages

Xen comes with man pages, see

• Xen Man Pages (via Wiki)
• Xen Man pages for unstable

They should be installed automatically with the xen-tools package and made available to users. The source and make files of the man pages (and documentation in general) are in xen-unstable.hg/docs

LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS: THINGS TO TEST IN VIRTUAL MACHINES

Networking

The paravirtualized network driver needs to work and be enabled by default. Test that xen-netfront is included in the ramdisk of your installer. People may need it for PXE boot installs.

Disk

Make sure the disk paravirtualized driver is working and enabled by default. Test that xen-blkfront is included in the ramdisk of your installer otherwise the installer won't see any available disks.