[CentOS-virt] Linux distributions supported by Xen as PVM domUs

Mon Jan 19 20:36:43 UTC 2009
Jason Voorhees <jvoorhees1 at gmail.com>

Hi:

Reading Red Hat's Website and a printed manual of RH184 (Red Hat
Virtualization course) I see that RHEL 5 only supports RHEL 4.5 and
RHEL 5 as paravirtualized guests. So I asume this is the same
situation for CentOS 5, right?

What's the dependency between Xen versions for paravirtualized guests?
I ask this questions because I got this experiences:

1. Running CentOS 5 as Dom0
- RHEL 4.5/CentOS 4.5 paravirtualized install, boot and works OK.
- RHEL 5/CentOS 5 paravirtualized install, boot and works OK.
- OpenSuSE 11 doesn't boot xen kernel.

2. Running OpenSuSE 11 as Dom0
- RHEL 4.5 or RHEL 5 installs correctly but doesn't boot. I got errors.

I don't have error messages right now (but I can get them if asked)
but I see a common difference: RHEL 4.5/RHEL5 and OpenSuSE have
different Xen versions. Also OpenSuSE uses domUloader (or something
like that) as boot manager instead of pygrub (or are they the same
thing?)

So the final question is: What are the requirements to run a
paravirtualized operating system? Are they fully dependent on Xen
version?
I would like to run different Linux distros paravirtualized, maybe
Opensolaris or FreeBSD. Is it possible?

Thanks, bytes!