2.6.25 paravirt_ops enabled domU on XEN

I really really had a lot of trouble getting a domU up and running. Its very irritating because of certain crazy things about XEN.

• Support for only 32 bit domU’s present in mainline as of this writing. I don’t know when will the 64bit support see any light.
• The default ‘latest’ working domU provided by xen.org is only 2.6.18.8. But its latest only in terms xen code, but not at all in terms of the upstream kernel.
• I could find any, any help regarding ‘how to run a pvops enabled kernel’ from ##xen @ Frenode, nor at a wiki page, nowhere. After hours of searching, I came across a big thread of discussion where everything was clearly mentioned. Phew.

Thus, finally I got a 2.6.25 domU up and running. Here’s what I had to do.

1. Enable XEN paravirt support in make menuconfig and also select all the XEN paravirt frontend drivers.
2. Get into XEN dom0. Edit the configuration file and add a “console=hvc0″ to the ‘extra’ parameter. Without this you wouldn’t be able to see the boot console output.
3. The disk type needs to be xvda. If you were using /dev/sda1 or some such, change the disk = ['...'] and also the parameter ‘root’ to”/dev/xvda1″.