I want to work with low level system programming and virtualization for my research. I tried Ubuntu 10.04 + Xen 4.0.0 but they weren't going quite well right from the installation. One of my friends suggested to take up Gentoo. Any more suggestions?
A:
If a working Xen is the main requirement, see this question's answers.
timday
2010-08-26 23:36:37
In those use-cases Xen is used right away. I need to compile xen from sources and recompile it. Thanks for the links. I will give one more try with Ubuntu/Debian.
Srujan Das
2010-08-28 20:59:01
Depends what you mean "from source". e.g The Debian source package http://packages.debian.org/source/lenny/xen-3 is the so-called pristine sources plus 52kB of patches (compressed). That's a bunch of patches Debian developers have found necessary to make Xen work in Debian. If you go off and download Xen sources from xen.org, and try and build/run them without those patches (or at least understanding what those patches are)... well you'd expect to have some problems.
timday
2010-08-28 23:17:47
In Ubuntu I had all the dependencies. But there is some problem with grub2 configuration it seems. Tried a bit of Googling but that didn't help much. Anyways will give one more try and see. Thanks for the link again.
Srujan Das
2010-08-29 03:16:31
A:
can you specify more in which area you want to work on in low level.If you want to work on kernel,i don't think there is any dependency on the destro,but if you want to work on other areas like compiler,graphics managers,network managers etc then suggestion can be made.But you have to provide some more details for that. And you said ubuntu + xen is not working quite well,what problem are you facing ??
Anil Vishnoi
2010-08-28 09:30:39
I will be extending Xen to build a tool. It would involve building xen from sources and re-compiling Xen. A little more to do with kernel and compilers.
Srujan Das
2010-08-28 20:58:01
A:
In our cluster, we use Fedora 12 Dom0 and DomU with xenified Dom0 kernel and pv_ops kernel in Fedora 12. That is we use the Fedora 12 DomU as it is. For Dom0, we install xen and Xenified kernel by ourselves.
This solution is tested to be stable. We run distributed parallel experiments on it (usually 7 DomUs on one physical machine) and it works well for us.
The "recommended" ones in http://pkill.info/b/2367/xen-solutions/ is our solution by now. Xen 3.4.3 + xenified kernel 2.6.32.13 is quite solid in our servers:
Eric
2010-08-28 10:59:25