Tag Archive for 'xen'

Virtualisation on HP ProLiant hardware with squeeze

In case you are using HP ProLiant G6-series or G7-series with Intel-based hardware and you are thinking about virtualistion (e.g. booting the hypervisor), you should have a look into this customer advisory. To make it short, the following should work:

# grep GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN=”pci=use_crs”
# update-grub

It took me two workdays to discover this solution for a DL180G6. Anyways … I’m still having trouble on a DL160G6 when booting the hypervisor, suggestions are welcome.

linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 and xen/xen-common from squeeze broken?

I’m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don’t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l | grep xen | grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools – common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen

This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated …. until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.
boot problems
A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0×189/0×221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] —[ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]—
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver ‘pcspkr’ is already registered, aborting…
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k

The dom0 is there hanging in some way … I don’t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there … usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways … I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I’ve also reported this via #602109.

[selfnote] Change CD-image while (HVM) domU is running

xm list | grep <VMName>
xm block-list <VMName_Number>
xm block-detach <VMName_Number> <VMName_Vdev> -f
xm block-attach <VMName_Number> file:///iso/disk.iso \
hdc:cdrom r

New server hardware for svn.kvirc.de

Maybe some of you have noticed, svn.kvirc.de was running under heavy load recently while it was smashed by search engine crawlers.

First we tried to tweak the trac installation, which caused the heavy load, when running the spiders trough. But it turned out, that this doesn’t has the effect to recover the situation, since the trac tree is growing (with the svn tree and revisions). So the spiders have more to crawle and taking more resources away.

We checked our relations and we where lucky to find with waaf.net a sponsor for new server hardware.

Some features of our new ProLiant DL360 server we baptized ‘baikonur‘:

* Dual Core Processor
* 2 GB RAM
* Compaq Smart Array Raid Controller
* 2x 72.8 GB IBM Ultra3 10K
* 2x Gigabit Ethernet
* Integrated Lights Out

The migration was quite relaxed. svn.kvirc.de is a virtual maschine, so we did setup the new host and proudly racked it up at the bandnew hosting center of TMT Teleservice as first (sponsored) customer. The last step was to migrate the system over to the new host and change the DNS records. The outage was something about 5-10 minutes basically caused by the TTL of 600.

Looking into the Load Average I think we have enought resources for a couple of more svn revisions and search engine spiders.

That’s all, happy ircing, and happy developing.


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