[Fedora-xen] XEN-3.0.3 on RHEL-5, fully virtualized guest of RH72 won't start after install finishes.

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 05:51:17PM -0400, Ben Russo wrote:
> I have many boxes running rh-7.2
> (these are stripped down, minimal installs, for appliances on a private 
> network that isn't routable)  I want to run VIRTUAL images of the
> same setup for testing purposes.
> 
> I read the Fedora 6 XEN getting started guide and skimmed through the 
> FAQ.  I browsed through this mailing list to see if I could find my
> problem here as well. No luck.
> 
> I have a Dell-2950 with Quad Core XEON processors, PAE, VMX, and it is 
> enabled in BIOS.  8GB RAM, 2GB assigned to Dom0
> 
> Booted into RHEL-5 Xen kernel, installed all the latest patches as of 
> 6/11/2007, and rebooted.
> 
> Then Started Virtual Machine Manager GUI
> Selected "New..." from File menu and followed the wizard.
> then installed FULLY VIRTUALIZED
> RH-72 from original Red Hat 7.2 CD's
> this went fine with the
> Virtual Machine Manager GUI "New Machine" wizard.
> The only non-usual thing I did for an RH72 install was
> to give it the kernel boot option mem=500M
> 
> After the install completed, the DomU guest said it was now going to
> reboot and I should remove any CD's.
> 
> Then the DomU disappeared.
> 
> It took me forever to figure out that I couldn't use the virt-manager 
> GUI to restore a DomU configuration file.  There really should be
> a more intuitive way for this to work.  I am not a dummy, and it took
> me forever to figure out how to start the DomU again.

The virt-manager release in Fedora 7 can now start existing inactive
guests. We recently pushed an update to Fedora 6  updates-testing
which can do the same.

> Now that I figured out that I have to go to a command line prompt and
> type "xm create -c /etc/xen/rh72-test",

That is no longer neccessary. Virt-manager can do that. You can also
do it with 'virsh'  which is the preferred tool for command line usage

  virsh start rh72-test

> Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address ffffffff
>  printing eip:
> c0204a00
> *pde = 00001063
> *pte = 00000000
> Oops: 0000
> CPU:    0
> EIP:    0010:[<c0204a00>]
> EFLAGS: 00010202
> eax: fffffff   ebx: 00000000   ecx: 00000004   edx: 00000004
> esi: fffffff   edi: c0229972   ebp: 0008e000   esp: c0257fb4
> ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
> Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpage=c0257000)
> Stack: c026d6e8 0000000 c024....
>        ...
>        ...
> Call Trace: [<....
> 
> Code: f3 a6 ...
>  <0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!

Please file BZ reports for any kernel panic issues - mailing lists
are a very bad way to track kernel bugs.

Dan.
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