Trouble with Xen

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#1 Sat, 2017-03-25 13:14
lloydsmart
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Hi all,

I'm hoping you can help me with a problem I'm having with Xen on Alpine.

I'm trying to install pfSense as a HVM, with Alpine as the Dom0. To achieve this, I installed the "Xen" flavour of Alpine Linux 3.5.2 to my hard drive using "lvmsys".

Here's the Xen configuration file I'm using:

builder = "hvm"
name = "pfsense"
memory = 2048
maxmem = 2048
vcpus = 2
acpi = 1
apic = 1
 
vif = [ 'bridge=br0, mac=00:3e:16:02:02:99' ]
 
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg0/pfsense,xvdb,w', 'phy:/dev/sdk,xvda,w' ]
boot = 'c'
 
sdl = 0
vnc = 0
nographics = 1
serial = 'pty'
 
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot = 'destroy'
on_crash = 'destroy'

(Where sdk is the USB stick containing the pfSense installer).

The problem is, when I try to boot the HVM, pfSense just gives a kernel panic, shown below:

Can anyone shed some light on what might be happening here? It's driving me mad! I posted over on the pfSense forums, but no-one has been able to help over there. Maybe this is something to do with grsec?

Many thanks.

Sun, 2017-03-26 18:51
lloydsmart
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Right, I've done a bit more digging on this and it's extremely wierd.

I can get it to work if I create a live-USB Dom0 using setup-xen-dom0 while booted from the Alpine-xen live USB. However, whenever I install Alpine to my hard drive and boot from there, I always get the kernel panic when I launch the pfSense HVM.

So now I guess I need to figure out what the difference is between the system that's running on the Alpine-Xen live USB and the system that gets installed to my hard drive via setup-alpine.

Very frustrating!

Sat, 2017-04-15 18:17
lloydsmart
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I've discovered that pfSense works in Xen if I boot from the Alpine live USB - but not if I install to my hard drive. This is really strange!

Does anyone know if any parameters that might affect Xen are changed during setup-alpine?

Now I'm wondering if there's a way I can just *copy* the alpine-xen root from the live USB to my hard drive, and do configuration after. Maybe that would allow Xen to work properly.

Sat, 2017-04-15 18:40
lloydsmart
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Well... I found the problem, and boy do I feel stupid.

I hadn't given Dom0 enough ram, and it was running out whenever I launched the pfSense HVM.

Just thought I'd post here in case anyone does the same thing in future.

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