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

Mon Nov 1 01:07:13 UTC 2010
Steven Ellis <mail_lists at stevencherie.net>

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.

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
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
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