[Xen-PV] pvGRUB aleays crashes instantly, what am I doing wrong?

English Virtualization
1

According to all documentation and examples that I’ve seen, using pvGRUB instead of pyGRUB is easy and straight-forward: just specifying

kernel = '/usr/lib/xen/boot/pv-grub-x86_*arch*.gz'
extra = '(hd*N,M*)/boot/grub/menu.lst'

should suffice; some how-tos also recommend to modify DomU’s configuration so that appropriate kernel modules are surely loaded on startup.

During several years I tried that on openSUSE 11.2 to 12.1, both on 32-bit and 64-bit, but never succeeded. For me, it results in a crashed DomU right after that domain is started (or unpaused, if created in paused state). No messages are output to xen-console or virtual framebuffer (I checked it by recording VNC session: it’s just empty). As long as I understand from examples, at least a menu or command-prompt should be visible at startup, even if target system is not bootable or doesn’t contain a valid GRUB menu, or the loaded kernel crashes. But I definitely see nothing.

Xen logs in Dom0 give no insight, since from VMM’s point of view this situation is completely DomU-related, there is no problem in Dom0. So I’m out of debugging ideas, and I’ve found no similar bug descriptions on the web. Any suggestions on how to pin-point the exact source of trouble? My guess is that I have a fundamental misunderstanding of some simple things.

2

Did you solve this? Think my openSUSE 12.1 with pvGrub has the same problem. Same guest and config on a Gentoo hypervisor works so something related to openSUSE hypervisor I guess.

3

No. As I said, from the time when I tried this first on openSUSE 11.2, then on 11.3, then on 11.4, and to the nowadays’ most recent 12.1, always faced this problem yet never heard that anyone had such a kind of trouble with pvGRUB, — crashing without any diagnostic messages. As for the other distros, not that I never tried them as Dom0, but always used pyGRUB; just couldn’t image that it can be related, so will try pvGRUB as well, thanks for idea.

Back to openSUSE. There was a topic here, “opensuse12.1 and Xen: VM boot error”, which implies that at least one person successfully uses pvGRUB with openSUSE 12.1 Dom0 — at least as I understood him, because he was getting boot messages (pyGRUB does not output them), yet he stated that VM was paravirtual rather than fully virtualized (with usual GRUB, as I first thought).