Mailing List Archive

Ah hah, I answered my own question, I was looking in the wrong kernel
source tree (xenU rather than xen0). I compiled my kernel, make the
initrd, and got it all setup. Now the dom0 kernel seems to see the
SCSI (virtual SCSI) drive okay, but I've run into trouble in the next
step -- getting the filesystem mounted. It seems this kernel can't
read the partition table, and I suspect it has something to do with
the way newer versions of Red Hat label partitions.

This may be more of a Red Hat / Linux kernel issue than a Xen issue,
but does anyone have any ideas? The final messages on-screen leading
up to the failure are:

Loading mptscsih.ko module
Fusion MPT SCSI Host driver 3.01.18
SCSI0 : ioc0: LSI53C1030, FwRev=0000000000h, Ports=1, MaxQ=128, IRQ=17
...
sda : sector size 0 reported, assuming 512.
SCSI device sda: 1 512-byte hdwr secotrs (0 MB)
sda: asking for cache data failed
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda : secotr size 0 reported, assuming 512.
SCSI device sda: 1 512-byte hdwr sectors (0 MB)
sda: asking for cache data failed
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: unknown partition table
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
Switching to new root
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
<0>Rebooting in 1 seconds..

Thanks!

-Fred

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 12:21:11 -0500, Fred Whipple <fwhipple@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Disclaimer: I'm entirely new to Xen, and am just testing it out for
> the first time with serious desire to consolidate servers. I have
> searched the ~2 months of archives of this list I have in GMail ;-)
> and the online list archive search seems broken :-( Also, I have not
> compiled a kernel in a couple years...
>
> All that out of the way, I ran into a hitch while installing Xen
> (2.0.3) for the first time -- that being that it can't seemingly see
> my root partition. The environment is VMWare 5 (Beta) for Windows and
> RHEL 4 (Beta; actually CentOS 4.0 Beta). Xen seems like it started to
> work, but when it tried to mount the virtual SCSI drive (under virtual
> LSI SCSI card) it couldn't find it.
>
> I went into the kernel source (2.6.10) that the install script copied
> into the Xen source directory and per instructions went to add modular
> SCSI support for the virtual SCSI card. Unfortunately I did not find
> anything relevant under SCSI Low Level Drivers. Curious, I looked at
> the same menu options under the 2.6.9 kernel source that comes with
> RHEL/CentOS, and there was a plethora of options.
>
> I've read several folks discussing SCSI cards on this list, so I have
> to think that Xen can boot from a SCSI disk. Is it the case that
> every device driver must be modified for use with Xen and the LSI
> driver just hasn't been modified yet? Or did I screw up elsewhere?
>
> TIA,
>
> -Fred
>


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> Disclaimer: I'm entirely new to Xen, and am just testing it out for

Welcome :-)

> All that out of the way, I ran into a hitch while installing Xen
> (2.0.3) for the first time -- that being that it can't seemingly see
> my root partition. The environment is VMWare 5 (Beta) for Windows and
> RHEL 4 (Beta; actually CentOS 4.0 Beta). Xen seems like it started to
> work, but when it tried to mount the virtual SCSI drive (under virtual
> LSI SCSI card) it couldn't find it.
>
> I went into the kernel source (2.6.10) that the install script copied
> into the Xen source directory and per instructions went to add modular
> SCSI support for the virtual SCSI card.

If you're going to boot off it, you need to build support statically into the
kernel. Modular support won't do because without the driver it won't have
anywhere to load the module from! (unless you put the module into an initrd
but that complicates things so I'm not going to describe that)

> Unfortunately I did not find
> anything relevant under SCSI Low Level Drivers. Curious, I looked at
> the same menu options under the 2.6.9 kernel source that comes with
> RHEL/CentOS, and there was a plethora of options.

Are you sure you were looking in the right place?

Try:
cd linux-2.6.10-xen0
make ARCH=xen menuconfig
<now go to Device Drivers/SCSI Device Support/SCSI Lowlevel Drivers and switch
the option for your preferred device to y>
<now exit menuconfig, saving the configuration>
cp .config ../dist/install/boot/config-2.6.10-xen0
cd ..
make dist
make install

> I've read several folks discussing SCSI cards on this list, so I have
> to think that Xen can boot from a SCSI disk. Is it the case that
> every device driver must be modified for use with Xen and the LSI
> driver just hasn't been modified yet? Or did I screw up elsewhere?

Non-buggy Linux device drivers should work fine with Xen. There are
occasional cases of x86-centric driver writers taking liberties that need to
be corrected but generally people don't have problems here.

HTH,
Mark

>
> TIA,
>
> -Fred
>
>
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> Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time
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> Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-devel mailing list
> Xen-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel


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