Fugitive Thought

In pursuit of easy Zentific development while on the go, I've been poking at my Asus EEE 901 for some time, trying to convince xen to work properly upon its somewhat unusual platform. Xen isn't necessarily appropriate for workstation virtualization (even though I make it work), so thus the trouble. I can't promise an experience like that encountered on a nice Opteron 8xxx or Xeon/i7 platform, but if you're like me this may be a good solution for you.

In fact, I'm posting from my eee running Xen this very moment.

As with all such things, the devil is in the details. The trouble with the EEE is its relatively recent hardware. The 2.6.20 kernel distributed by Asus with its custom xandros derivative is very hacked to support such hardware - not that this is a bad thing, because it works wonderfully, but it implies that stepping outside of that rather custom-built box introduces some fun. As it is, the wifi drivers are - as of 2.6.30 - still in the unofficial, not-endorsed, 'staging' section of the kernel, otherwise known as the scary experimental department. Yes, that's ten versions after the .20 kernel originally running this thing, which demonstrates just how new some of this hardware is from a driver perspective.

But I digress, as usual.

I've been running the netbook remix version of Ubuntu Hardy. This is essentially a normal Hardy install with a patched version of 2.6.24 to support hardware appropriately, plus a few userspace helpers and some nice interface tweaks for the tiny screen. At any rate, this distribution is entirely sufficient for Xen (I take issue with the Ubuntu Xen package maintainer and moreover the way Canonical is approaching virtualization, but that's a different post. :)

So, the details:

I've built Xen 3.4-rc4 and a 2.6.30-xen kernel directly derived from Jeremy Fitzhardinge's paravirt-ops tree at git.kernel.org. The former includes its own 2.6.18 kernel (with many backported drivers), but the system is only barely usable in that state. With my kernel, however "everything works" - in quotations because it's not really everything (the webcam doesn't for example), but that's good enough for me for the time being. If someone really cares, I'll poke at it some more.

The meat can be found at http://zentific.com/files/eee/pvops-dom0-xen-kernel.tar.gz and http://zentific.com/files/eee/xen-3.4-rc3-eee.tar.gz -- but be sure to peruse the readme I've put together for particulars. http://zentific.com/files/eee/readme

Hope this helps someone. If not, oh well. Fugitivethought is my personal braindump so I can forget about some of the details and come back to check later.

Any questions, notes, etc email me or leave a comment.

-s