Tinycorelinux on Xenserver

[mistera]

Hello,

has anyone tried TCL on Xenserver? I tried to boot from the ISO in a VM I created but it crashed immediately and throws a 'call trace'.

I created a new vm with 512MB RAM, 1 VCPU and 512MB storage.

Any ideas how to get TCL installed on Xenserver? Or perhaps Xen, as Xenserver is based on Xen?

Best regards,
Jan

[curaga]

If you do a forum search on xen, you'll find many of those who have used TC/MC on Xen.

[gutmensch]

I have tc 3.3 running on a XenServer 5.6.0,  no extra steps needed, runs smoothely without XenServer Tools. Since there was no major change between 3.3 and 3.4 I doubt it's tinycore, which is causing your problem...

[mistera]

Hi,

strange. It's still not working. I configured a new VM in Xencenter again, and I chose 'other install media'.
I tried  TCL 3.0,  3.3 and the latest version. Both fail to boot and throw the same error. You can see an example in the attachment.

My host is a six core opteron system (single socket), with 8GB of ram and local storage. It's running Xenserver 5.5.

Best regards,
Jan

[gutmensch]

Hm, I cannot compare it to 5.5, back then I didn't have a tc running on it... Opteron here as well, 16 core, 96 GB of RAM, 2 TB FC Multipath Why aren't you updating to 5.6? Should be hassle-free (if not in cluster mode) and at least it is also recommended by Citrix IIRC

[mistera]

Ok, version 2.9 boots in the same VM I used to test the 3.x versions.

Bug in 3.x???

[mistera]

I'm using 5.5 because I use mdadm (software raid)  for local storage.
With version 5.6 i had major issues setting mdadm up for local storage.

[gutmensch]

I don't think it's a bug in tc 3.x, because it's running on so many systems and even on XenServer 5.6 flawlessly. Probably you need a special boot code to get 3.x running on XenServer 5.5 like noapic, it's surely a bug in XenServers vm abstraction layer.

[edit]
btw. tc 2.x uses kernel 2.6.29, tc 3.x uses 2.6.33 - it might be possible that XenServer 5.5 is not compatible with all features of 2.6.33 or compatible at all, XenServer 5.5 is from 06/2009, 2.6.33 is from 02/2010.
[/edit]

[mistera]

probaby due to my version of xenserver, although I don't really see it should matter that much.

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?action=printpage;topic=7743.0

The link above describes exactly the same error message I'm getting, but they used some version of virtualpc

[gutmensch]

it's not exactly the same error message, it's just a printout of a stack trace, which means something crashed.

I can tell you why that should matter much:

XenServer 5.5 - Xen 3.2 - tc 2.x works, tc 3.x crashes
XenServer 5.6 - Xen 3.4 - tc 2.x works, tc 3.x works

It cannot be tc, which is causing the error, when it is running under XenServer 5.6. Xen must be the problem here and I suppose it's kernel incompatibility.

[mistera]

ok, thanks for your feedback!

[mistera]

Okay, so I tried again to boot from the latest tinycore linux version on a similar system (ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard but with same 6-core opteron 4170HE) but now on the latest Xenserver version 5.6FP1.

I get exactly the same result, I press ENTER to boot the ISO and the console throws a call trace.
I use other install media when creating the VM, so this means HVM virtualisation if I'm not mistaken...

Any ideas?

[gutmensch]

Hm, must be something to your hardware.. do you have the latest BIOS updates?

I tried it myself again and screencasted it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZb48XUYqIs

Although it's quite unclear, you can see that it works like expected. I use other install media, choose tinycore-3.4.1.iso, add HDD, CPU, Network and start it up. HVM is not used until xe-tools are installed (which are not available for tinycore atm).