Xen FAQ Linux Distributions

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Revision as of 09:40, 13 April 2012 by Ijc (talk | contribs) (Remove obsolete info refering to FC3 (released 2004) and Debian Sarge (released 2005) as well as mention of twisted which hasn't been used in Xen since I can't remember when)
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What Debian packages do I need for Xen?

To run Xen and a single OS from a binary release you need install no extra packages. To build Xen, XenLinux and documentation from source you will need: make, libncurses5-dev, libncurses5, gcc, libc6-dev, zlib1g-dev, python, python-dev, python-twisted, openssl, openssl-dev, bridge-utils, iproute, libcurl3, libcurl3-dev, bzip2, module-init-tools, latex, latex2html, transfig, and tgif.

How do I fix the 4gb seg fixup messages in my syslog?



These messages are from a glibc that was built with negative GS register offsets. Xen can run with negative GS register references, but it must "trap and emulate" this condition, which is relatively resource intensive, and quite slow.

If you don't have a patched glibc, see the no-tls-direct-seg-refs patch mentioned in XenSpecificGlibc.

Most newer distributions are shipped with a "-mno-tls-direct-seg-refs" compiled glibc, but it might not be enabled by default.

Some newer distributions like the RHEL5 Beta1/Beta2 require the ld.so.conf.d trick below to refer to the patched glibc.

Some slightly older distributions like Ubuntu Dapper can be fixed with a simple rebuild of glibc: (see UbuntuDapperHowTo).


 echo 'hwcap 0 nosegneg' > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc6-xen.conf && ldconfig

Reference Link: http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2006-11/msg00026.html and http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-xen@redhat.com/msg00041.html

Where do I find more information about Xen and my favorite Linux/Unix distro?

Ubuntu

Debian

Fedora

CentOS

OpenSUSE

Gentoo

Arch Linux

NetBSD

FreeBSD

Solaris