[CentOS-virt] Xen on Centos 5.5 vs 5.3 and stability issues

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 02:07:13PM +1300, Steven Ellis wrote:
> Had a try at the weekend but I didn't have a female adapter handy to bring
> up the serial console.
> 
> I did manage to try out some Centos 5.4 kernels, all of which worked in the
> Dom0 environment. I'm now running
>  * 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5xen
> 
> Also I upgraded a Centos 5.3 DomU to 5.5 with no issues, and it is running
> the most recent Centos 5.5 Xen kernel.
> 
> What is really odd is that the freeze or kernel panic with a 5.5 kernel can
> vary. On one occasional I got as far as the single user prompt before the
> machine locked up, but usually it dies as udev start.
> 
> I'll try and grab a cable/adapter to try again, but it will be a couple of
> days before I can bring the server down again.
> 

Did you check if the server has SOL? Many management cards/processors
include SOL (Serial Over LAN).

-- Pasi

> Steve
> 
> On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:37:17 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:56:33PM +1300, Steven Ellis wrote:
> >>    I've recently upgraded a Centos 5.3 machine to Centos 5.5. The
> > hardware
> >>    isn't HVM capabile so I'm only running para-virt guests.
> >>
> >>    Using a vanilla i386 kernel boots without, but the newer kernel-xen
> > locks
> >>    up the Dom0 after a couple of minute. I'm only booting into single
> > user
> >>    mode for these tests so no VMs are active.
> >>
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 - no issues
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 - lock up
> >>      * kernel-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 - no issues
> >>
> >>    For the moment I've switched back to the older Xen kernel, athough
> > I'm
> >>    still running the newer Xen Hypervisor.
> >>
> > 
> > Please set up a serial console and capture the full error/crash messages
> > and post the log here.
> > 
> > Examples here:
> > http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenSerialConsole
> > 
> > -- Pasi
> > 
> >>    My current Xen packages are
> >>
> >>      * xen-3.0.3-105.el5_5.5
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
> >>      * kmod-xfs-xen-0.4-2
> >>      * xen-libs-3.0.3-105.el5_5.5
> >>      * kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5
> >>      * kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
> >>      * xen-devel-3.0.3-105.el5_5.5
> >>
> >>    Prior to the upgrade I had the following installed under Centos 5.3
> >>
> >>      * kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
> >>      * xen-libs-3.0.3-80.el5_3.2
> >>      * xen-devel-3.0.3-80.el5_3.2
> >>      * kmod-xfs-xen-0.4-2
> >>      * kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5
> >>      * kernel-xen-devel-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5
> >>      * xen-3.0.3-80.el5_3.2
> >>
> >>    Booting Dom0 with kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 everything appears
> > to
> >>    work normally and all of my Guests are up and running.
> >>
> >>    If I boot with  kernel-xen-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 the boot normally gets
> > to
> >>    around udev and the system locks up. On a couple of occasions it did
> > mange
> >>    to boot but reported some files were corrupted. I'm worried that
> > there is
> >>    an issue running this kernel where the root file system is LVM on top
> > of
> >>    Raid 1.
> >>
> >>    Anyone on this list have tips on diagnosing the issue, or come across
> > a
> >>    similar problem themselves.
> >>
> >>    Steve
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > 
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> CentOS-virt mailing list
> >> CentOS-virt at centos.org
> >> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > CentOS-virt mailing list
> > CentOS-virt at centos.org
> > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS-virt mailing list
> CentOS-virt at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt