[CentOS-virt] reboot guest on panic

Mon Mar 15 00:06:01 UTC 2010
Norman Gaywood <ngaywood at une.edu.au>

On 15 March 2010 10:12, Christopher G. Stach II <cgs at ldsys.net> wrote:
> ----- "Norman Gaywood" <ngaywood at 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.

-- 
Norman Gaywood, Computer Systems Officer
University of New England, Armidale,
NSW 2351, Australia

ngaywood at une.edu.au            Phone: +61 (0)2 6773 3337
http://mcs.une.edu.au/~norm    Fax:   +61 (0)2 6773 3312

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