Xen Fullvirt Direct Kernel Boot

Posted by dba477 on Mar 3, 2008 1:16 PM EDT
fedoraproject.org; By Daniel Berrange
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In all prior Fedora releases fullyvirtualized Xen guests had to boot via the QEMU BIOS. This means booting from a CDROM, harddisk, or Network PXE. Paravirtualized guests could always boot directly from a kernel and initrd. This allowed for fully automated guest installation since it allowed the tools to pass arguments straight into anaconda. KVM fullyvirtualized guests also support direct kernel booting.

The support for Xen HVM was always there in the underlying QEMU device model, however, it was disabled as it conflicted with the way Xen boots HVM guests. Recently patches were added to upstream Xen to work-around the limitations of Xen's HVM boot process, so it is now possible to directly boot fullyvirtualized Xen guests from a kernel and initrd, passing boot args. It will be possible to automate the installation of fullyvirtualized Linux guests under Xen, giving feature parity with Xen paravirt and KVM guest install processes.

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