[Fedora-xen] treating logical volumes as physical drives

[Justin Wickett]

I decided to go with my third approach and ended up installing FC5 on  
an ext3 formatted logical volume within my LVM partition containing  
my host OS (FC6) and specified a FC5 xen PAE-supported kernel in my  
xen config file. The kernel seemed to load without any problems when  
I tried creating the xen config file while in FC6, but panicked since  
I failed to "append a correct "root=" boot option". From the console  
view, I noticed that my kernel command line was  "root=/dev/hda2/dev/ 
VolGroup00/xm_fc5_001_lv ro 4", which obviously doesn't make any  
sense. I followed the basic install for FC6, with the addition of  
creating multiple logical volumes within my LVM partition. What would  
be the correct string to set the root variable found inside of the  
xen config files as?

Here are the last couple of lines I get while in console view before  
the kernel panics...

md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
VFS: Cannot open root device "hda2/dev/VolGroup00/xm_fc5_001_lv" or  
unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown- 
block(0,0)

More of my system information can be viewed at http://www.duke.edu/ 
~jyw2/xenerrors.html

Justin Wickett
Duke 2010
http://www.duke.edu/~jyw2



On Dec 30, 2006, at 4:07 PM, Justin Wickett wrote:

> I would like to use a logical volume as a "physical" drive on which  
> I can install a fedora operating system. As of now, when I run  
> xenguest-installer, it treats the install location that I specified  
> ( which is an unformatted logical volume that I had just created )  
> as a physical drive (named "xvda") and allows me to perform a basic  
> install on it. When I look at that logical volume, it comes up as a  
> "foreign" device, because it contains a /boot directory, and a  
> volume group consisting of a  / directory and a swap directory. I  
> was wondering how to mimic that effect without using my xenguest- 
> installer program, so that when I pop a CD in and the installer  
> starts up, I can specify a logical volume and let the installer  
> treat it as a physical drive just like the xenguest-installer  
> program does.
>
> I am trying to accomplish this because I was unable to install FC4  
> via the xenguest-installer. I had mounted the image as a loopback  
> device to /var/ftp/pub and specified the /pub directory in FTP  
> server's root folder as my "Installation source", and was greeted  
> by an error from my FTP server (vsftpd) saying "550 Failed to  
> change directory". When I do the exact same thing except mount the  
> FC6 iso instead of the FC4 iso, everything works fine. What could I  
> be doing wrong?
>
> If all else fails, I guess I can just specify in my /etc/xen/xm- 
> fc4-001 file the kernel and the ramdisk parameters, and install FC4  
> on an ext3 formatted logical volume specified as the / directory,  
> and thus reuse my existing /boot directory instead of trying to use  
> the pygrub bootloader with a new /boot directory. In this case,  
> where could I find a compiled xenU kernel and an appropriate initrd  
> image for FC4?
>
> Thank you very much and happy new years to all!
>
> Justin Wickett
> Duke 2010
> http://www.duke.edu/~jyw2
>
>
>
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