[Fedora-xen] configuration files

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 11:42:41AM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Urs Golla <urs.golla at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Hi Markus
> >
> > Thanks for your reply!
> >
> >> Because it's not XML.
> >
> > That really explains a lot ;-)
> 
> ;)
> 
> > I always assumed the "legacy" format from /etc/xen/mydomainconfig
> > (like in RHEL 5) is the native XEN syntax (I see this is not the
> > case.).  So, the xml format from libvirt is like a replacement for the
> > configuration in /etc/xen/mydomainconfig? But if I use virt-install
> > (e.g. in Fedora 8) to install a new machine, it does not create a file
> > /etc/xen/ and also no xml. All It does is creating the s-expression
> > file in /var/lib/.
> >
> > Is there a documentation about the relation between all this different
> > XEN / libvirt configuration files? The architecture part of the
> > documentation on libvirt.org does not answer this question.
> >
> > cheers
> 
> Xen uses *two* native configuration file formats: S-expressions and a
> Python-like syntax.  The .sxp files you found below /var/lib/xend/ use
> the former syntax, the guest configuration in /etc/xen the latter.

To be more specific

 'xend' use /var/lib/xend for storing master config files in SXPR format.
 'xm' abuses python as a config file format in /etc/xen. XenD itself has
 no knowledge of these files, so it can't manage them. They should not
 be used in Xen >= 3.0.4 If you have existing files in /etc/xen, then you
 can load them into XenD by doing 'xm new configname', at which point
 both Xend and libvirt will be able to manage them. For Xen < 3.0.4
 libvirt has some limited support for reading /etc/xen files directly

Daniel
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