Leap paravirt. guest under Leap (Xen)?

English Virtualization
#1

I installed Xen kernel under Leap 42.1 and then tried to install Leap as a guest using paravirtualization, but the option to install from the .ISO file was not allowed - only if I select full virtualization. I thought Leap was “Xen friendly” and so should be installable with paravirtualization (to get better performance). Maybe I have to install with full virtualization then convert to paravirtualization?

Thanks in advance for any words of explanation why this isn’t working, and maybe how to get it to work.
Patti

PS: I am currently using virtualbox (VB) under Leap to do virtualization, and using only VM’s for day-to-day work (with weekly offline VM backups). This is primarily to avoid issues with ransomware. However, some attack vectors are becoming VB-aware. I understand Xen is more secure than VB. Qubes (a Xen system) may be the most secure VM host, but is less transparent to set up that Leap+Xen.

PPS: Yesterday, friend’s work was ransomwared. Apparently this attack is growing superexponentially:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/extortionists-wipe-thousands-of-databases-victims-who-pay-up-get-stiffed/#more-37597

#2

If your background is in any other virtualization than Xen, the first thing you need to realize is the world is reversed… up is down and down is up.

So,
What you might have understood as paravirtualization using any Type 2 hypervisor (essentially the entire world not according to Xen), is now HVM(aka full virtualization) or “virtualization using CPU extensions”

and

What you thought to be “Full virtualization” as implemented by QEMU and very early versions of virtualization like VMware and the “Virtual PC” bought by Microsoft is now called in Xen PV(aka Paravirtualization) (virtualization without hardware extensions).

For understanding the “World according to Xen” I recommend reading the following Xen documentation
https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Software_Overview

This is what I railed against in the community openSUSE docs on virtualization, it was obviously written by people who were expert in Xen but didn’t realize that the terminology is often very opposite for anyone using KVM. Note that I didn’t find anything in the virtualization docs that was functionally wrong if someone followed specified steps, but the terminology was/is all wrong.

So, for both Xen and KVM I instead recommend using the SLES documentation which I find to be accurate and informative without error for both virtualization technologies.

TSU

#3

Thanks. I thought paravirt meant Type-1 (Xen) and fullvirt means KVM, Virtualbox, etc.

I’m just trying to figure out how to, and if it’s possible (and desirable), to install Leap guest paravirt under Xen/Leap host.

#4

The key to your decision should be to just look for hardware support (ie CPU extensions), and ignore whatever it’s named.

Therefore, when you’re using Xen you should use HVM (ie full virtualization) and not PV (paravirtualization).

And, of course everyone using any other virtualization should completely ignore my previous sentence, it will only confuse you.

TSU