On 15 March 2010 10:12, Christopher G. Stach II cgs@ldsys.net wrote:
----- "Norman Gaywood" ngaywood@une.edu.au wrote:
64bit multi-vcpu. The guest is quite heavyweight, 30GB of memory and 12vcpu. It's a LTSP server designed to handle lots of graphical logins for computer science students. This, I guess is not a common workload.
I wouldn't say that it's an uncommon workload, or VM configuration, at all. However, it is an uncommon kernel. Is there any reason that you need to use that one? Can/Does it work with something more "approved"?
LTSP setups are either Fedora or Ubuntu which run about the same vintage of kernel.
Thing is that the 2.6.3? kernels that are supposed to work as a Xen PV guest have been around a long time now. None of them seem to work in my case. The oldest I tried was 2.6.30.
Installing say a Centos kernel on fedora does not look to be an option. Ubuntu seem to have pretty much the same software/kernel as fedora. It's a lot of work to build sometime like our current setup on Ubuntu only to discover it probably has the same problem. Note also this problem was not reproduced in testing until very recently (see the bugzilla).
Another way would be to install Fedora/Ubuntu on the bare metal like we have on older versions of this system. But sigh, I hit a different bug going that way with "Enterprise Hardware" not supported in modern kernels.
So these 2.6.3? kernels are supposed to work as PV guests. And in any event, it looks like the problem might be in the Xen Hypervisor anyway. The bugzilla was moved from a Fedora bug the a RH EL bug (not by me).
My thinking at the moment for a way forward is to look at switching my guest to KVM. But that's even more bleeding edge.