I decided to install Xen 3.0 on the SuperMicro SuperServer 6014H-T with RAID 1 using Fedora Core 4 as operating system.
Sooner or later will this device be used as host for one of my many
virtual machines of which one will run this little blog.
This device contains a ICH5 and a Marvell 88SX6541-BCZ SATA controller,
two Intel Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz x86_64 and some other bla bla hardware.
I partly succeeded. I haven’t yet got the Marvell SATA controller working since that one isn’t yet supported in the kernel being
used by the Xen 3.0 version (it’s using 2.6.12). This was my procedure:
Buy yourself two SATA cables of 50 cm. The current ones are way to short to reach the ICH5 controller.
Open the device and connect your harddisks to the ICH5 controller. The
SATA ports are right behind the standard PATA controllers (behind the
blue and the black IDE controllers). Look in your manual page 5-9.
Insert the Fedora Core 4 x86_64 cdrom 1 and install using the following
partitioning settings (don’t install much, it’s just your dom0):
/dev/sda1: /boot (100M)
/dev/sdb1: /boot_backup (100M)
/dev/sda2: Software RAID (2000M
/dev/sdb2: Software RAID (2000M)
/dev/sdaX, /dev/sdbX: other partitions
/dev/sdaY, /dev/sdbY: swap
Software RAID: / (using sda2, sdb2)
[root@oceanus ~]# yum update && reboot
You’ll now have the sata_mv module as it’s in the 2.6.14
kernel which is available as a Fecora Core 4 update. If you load it you can
see the Marvell 88SX6541-BCZ SATA controller being empty in dmesg.
Regretfully is the Xen 3.0 version using Linux kernel 2.6.12 which
doesn’t yet support the sata_mv driver. So we’re going to leave our
hotswap controller for what it is and hope that the next Xen release
will use Linux kernel 2.6.14 or newer.
Download Xen-3.0 (the tarball release).
The Xen 3.0 Fedora Core 4 binary release install will totally corrupt your x86_64 packages. If you forcefully attempt to install
them, after force installing the e2fsutils you’re mount and umount tools will no longer function. If you
did, you can recover using a Fedora Core 4 rescue disk.
Untar and install it using the defaults. Don’t yet do the grub update. Or do it but watch out! You do need to add an initrd and
you should remove the boot from the /boot/blabla from each line. That’s because we’ve installed /boot to sda1 as
a partition with only /boot on it.
[root@oceanus ~]# cd /root [root@oceanus ~]# mkinitrd -v -f --with=ipv6 --with=e1000 --with=ext3 \ --with=jbd --with=raid1 --with=sd_mod --with=scsi_mod \ --builtin=ata_piix --builtin=sata_mv --builtin=dm_mod \ initrd-2.6.12.6-xen.img 2.6.12.6-xen [root@oceanus ~]# cp initrd-2.6.12.6-xen.img /boot [root@oceanus ~]# echo >> /etc/grub.conf [root@oceanus ~]# echo "title Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6" >> /etc/grub.conf [root@oceanus ~]# echo -en "\tkernel /xen-3.0.gz console=vga" >> /etc/grub.conf [root@oceanus ~]# echo -en "\tmodule /vmlinuz-2.6-xen root=/dev/md0 ro console=tty0" >> /etc/grub.conf [root@oceanus ~]# echo -en "\tmodule /initrd-2.6.12.6-xen.img" >> /etc/grub.conf [root@oceanus ~]# reboot
[root@oceanus ~]# uname -a Linux oceanus 2.6.12.6-xen #1 SMP Sun Dec 4 20:40:43 GMT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [root@oceanus ~]# [root@oceanus ~]# mount /dev/md0 on / type ext3 (rw) ... [root@oceanus ~]# [root@oceanus ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor processor : 0 processor : 1 processor : 2 processor : 3 [root@oceanus ~]#