[Fedora-xen] Hide the host

[Richard W.M. Jones]

mathieu rohon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to use xen with fedora as host, and several OSes as guest (in 
> fact 2).
> The aim is to use the host as a router for the guests.
> So i'd like to make the host as thin as possible, in order to provide 
> most power to the guest. Do you know a smart way to do so?
> 
> I'd also  like to hide the host from the user. When the user log in the 
> host, a script is launched, and the appropriated guest start in full 
> screen. Does anyone has already done something similar?

Will the guests be running all the time or do you wish to launch a new 
guest for each login?

The simplest case is probably going to be when you have the guests 
running all the time.  In that case, edit /etc/inittab to disable normal 
mingetty, and replace with a script which runs a vncviewer and connects 
to the guest.  (Mind you, launching the vncviewer under X is going to be 
a little more complex ...)  Also have a start-up script under 
/etc/init.d which launches the guests, or make use of the 
/etc/init.d/xendomains script which does the same thing.

Beware that while you want a "thin" dom0, you want to avoid making it 
too small, because in Xen at least the dom0 runs processes on behalf of 
the guests.  Not least if you have file-backed guests then there is a 
process called either qemu-dm or tapdisk which takes a significant 
amount of CPU and RAM.  (Guests which have their disks mapped directly 
to LVs or partitions seem to be much more efficient in this respect).

Rich.

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