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eCS under XEN - FAIL

Started by calmssea, 2008.07.16, 21:33:33

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calmssea

Might thought I'd share my experience.

In my office, I run many XEN related stuff for our production/ development environment.
That includes many Fedora stuffs.

A few days ago, I successfully installed Windows 2003 under XEN, and thought if Windows 2003 can run, why not eCS?

As the XEN servers were running FC7 under intel XEON's which already have virtualization support.

Thus, got my eCS1.2 CD, and tried to get it going.

unfortunately, the installation halts at the first upper left blob.


This was done using FC7-XEN, under latest update level at 2008 Jul


Thanks

RobertM

It might be lack of Ring 2 support? Not sure... or hardware that isnt virtualized (or supported) in the fashion eCS requires. Not familiar enough with XEN to do more than speculate.


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Saijin_Naib

I would venture that a version of eCS with the most recent ACPI sub-system and kernel be employed just in case.

calmssea

yeah..when I receive 2.0, i think i would give it another try. My current subscription is expired with a promise with 2.0 delivery only...:)

BTW, after several more attempts and comparison among other virtualization tools, only i was able to reliably get it working was ironically under Virtual PC 2007.

Sun's Virtual Box would boot, but stall under the splash screen even when using preset eComstation settings..

XEN would refuse to load the initial CD booter.

so there it is. Hope 2.0 would fix all those.

El Vato

Quote from: calmssea on 2008.07.16, 21:33:33
Might thought I'd share my experience.

In my office, I run many XEN related stuff for our production/ development environment.
That includes many Fedora stuffs.

A few days ago, I successfully installed Windows 2003 under XEN, and thought if Windows 2003 can run, why not eCS?[...]

Thanks

Getting Windows started on Xen wasn't easy, said Simon Crosby, a XenSource co-founder and vice president of corporate development for the 45-person company. For example, the boot process uses 16-bit code from that must be emulated on today's 32-bit and 64-bit chips, he said.

Hence, for an operating system in the periphery, they [correctly] assume that the effort to emulate the OS/2 booting procedure is not worth their time (and money).  Now that  Citrix --whose most important business partner is MS-- has acquired XenSource and has committed to continue to support the development of open source Xen (as XenSource did before it was acquired) do not cross your fingers.

The protection model of the Intel x386 CPU is built from four rings: ring 0 is for the OS and ring 3 is for user applications. Rings 1 and 2 are not used except in rare cases, such as OS/2; see the IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 1: Basic Architecture, section 4.5 (privilege levels).

In Xen, a "hypervisor" runs in ring 0, while guest OSes run in ring 1 and applications run in ring 3. The x64/64 is a little different in this respect: both guest kernel and applications run in ring 3 (see Xen 3.0 and the Art of Virtualization, section 4.1 in OLS 2005 proceedings).

Xen itself is called a hypervisor because it operates at a higher privilege level than the supervisor code of the guest operating systems that it hosts.

At boot time, Xen is loaded into memory in ring 0. It starts a patched kernel in ring 1; this is called domain 0.
...


Hence your Fedora is running in ring 1 --since it is the Dom 0.

Probably if OS/2's kernel were open sourced, it could be modified and it could be running as Dom 0 at ring 1 ???

OpenSolaris did not advance much further than the Grand Unified Boot (GRUB) Loader splash screen under XenServer 4.1 by selecting the other os templates.

Since OpenSolaris is another Unix dervivative --much like Linux is an Unix clone-- one would assume, following your assumption, that OpenSolaris would boot effortlessly under an supported Xen distribution like XenServer --or in your case a GNU/Linux modified ring 1 (Dom 0) kernel.  Hence, not because effort was expended to emulate the WinXX booting process, it follows logically that (such) effort will translate to the OS/2 experience.

But I was able to have 64-bit Fedora 9 Sulphur and 32-bit WS03 virtual machines executing concurrently in an AMD64 dedicated server with an application of XenServer 4.1 to the bare metal of the machine --hypervisor running at ring 0, with a minimal Dom 0 executing at ring 1 (responsible for the virtual machine or Dom U creations).  If interested, please see Metztli IT's web log entry for June 12, 2008.

Quote from: calmssea on 2008.07.17, 08:57:55
[...]
Sun's Virtual Box would boot, but stall under the splash screen even when using preset eComstation settings..
[...]
Although I originally named this VirtualBox VM as WSEB vBox, I actually installed Warp Server 4 advanced as a test under Sun's Virtual Box executing into an 64-bit GNU/Linux Debian  --so OS/2 installs there and you probably missed a step.

Hope that helps...