Trouble with Xen
#1
Sat, 2017-03-25 13:14
lloydsmart
-
- Offline
- 11 months 1 week ago
- 2017-03-25
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.
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!
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.
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.