On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:21:01 Constant Brouerius van Nidek wrote:

Have installed 11.0 on my laptop, Pentium 3 with for the moment only 256 M memory. Still trying to find my way in the new 11.0 and found under system/virtualization the offer to "Install Hypervisor and Tools"

Always open to try something new I started installing. I have a small windows XP and a Drdos on the partition and thought it a good idea.

After the install I got as far as Create a Virtual Machine where I just get:

Error The processor(s) in this machine do not support full virtualization

What is keeping Xen from accepting my laptop? Any way around this blockage?

To support full (hardware) virtualisation you need a cpu that supports it. Only certain AMD and Intel cpu's and chipsets are capable of full virtualisation. The Pentium 3 is definitely not one of those - way too old. I'd also suggest that even VMWare and/or VirtualBox will struggle on that machine - simply not enough memory. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au =================================================== When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal. -- Amrom Katz

----- Original Message ----- From: "Constant Brouerius van Nidek" To: Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 8:51 AM Subject: [opensuse] Xen install stuck

Have installed 11.0 on my laptop, Pentium 3 with for the moment only 256 M memory. Still trying to find my way in the new 11.0 and found under system/virtualization the offer to "Install Hypervisor and Tools"

Always open to try something new I started installing. I have a small windows XP and a Drdos on the partition and thought it a good idea.

After the install I got as far as Create a Virtual Machine where I just get:

Error The processor(s) in this machine do not support full virtualization

What is keeping Xen from accepting my laptop? Any way around this blockage?

I don't know but I have some brand new dual-quad core xeon E5333's with full VT support and 8 gigs of ecc ram servers and it doesn't work on them either. I don't get any error, just a hang at the point of "create vm"

From there I went on to try many things and other Linux versions (older opensuse, ubuntu) and do much searching and reading on the web and discovered that simply put, Xen is not in a good state right now on Any OS. There are several overlapping and interrelating issues going on at once and it's pretty confusing to a new Xen user (like me btw) because for one thing, almost all documentation about Xen, including that which is on the Xen site itself, is obsolete!

Basically there are two main forms of Xen, and they each have advantages and disadvantages so there is no good way to say which one is the best or the most correct. One form of Xen is the full set of kernel patches created and supported by Xensource themselves. This set of patches only applies against a pretty old version of linux, 2.6.18 (opensuse 10.2 btw) Major distribution providers, especially RedHat it looks like, have been doing a ton of work to forward-port those patches to newer kernels since then, but they are always proprietary, unofficial, non-standard, and unsupported patches. Unsupported by either Xensource or the main kernel developers that is, the dist may or may no provide some support for their own builds in some cases. This form of Xen, whether it's from the stock Xensource kernel or forward-ported by say Suse, supports the most fancy features like live migration of running images etc.. but uses not the latest developments in the virtualization and so the network, disk, memory, & cpu performance are somewhat less than what the latest form uses. This way requires different configuration from the way the most current form uses, an older style that still mostly agrees with most Xen documentation out there. most. In Kernels since 2.6.22, the main upstream kernel has been including built-in support for virtualization, not just for Xen but for anything, vmware, KVM (sort of like qemu) etc.. So the latest Xen uses this. Or rather, Xen on the latest kernels may use this or not. It's also possible to compile a kernel with all the virt stuff disabled. This form of Xen sports some new and pretty significant performance enhancements, some great simplification of the virtual nic config and the funky bridge interface that you usually want for best performance in the simpler cases where you don't need actual routing. But the config is completely different. Similar in style but different in detail such that existing config file examples and even the existing utility and rc scripts that ship with the product don't work, or in some cases work only by virtue of backwards compatibility not because they are right. Or work but not fully (Example, on my most recent ubuntu 8.04 trial, networking didn't work from dom0 to the internet, physically it can work by manually redoing the bridge and physical and virtual interfaces a certain way, but the rc scripts that must have worked a couple versions ago don't yet work today, thanks to the kernel and/or some of the xen utils having different automatic/default behaviour today. That kind of thing.) It's basically a big fat mess right now. RedHat are currently working towards Getting Xen fully ported to current kernels, by getting patches included into both the upstream kernel and Xen itself so that distributors won't have to keep forward-porting the old Xen patches from 2.6.18 over and over, which are incompatible with the virtualization support thats now built-in. Currently it appears that the best recipe for Xen is to use Fedora Core's Xen host for dom0 from FC8, and then under that you can use almost anything as domU's. I haven't fully followed that recipe myself yet but that was the latest result of my reading, including ubuntu and fedora xen mail lists and bugzilla's. I would Assume that using opensuse 10.2 would be just about as good, and perhaps easier since you are obviously an opensuse user. Generally, whatever the distribution the choices seem to be use one or two versions back from current to have anything actually work, or find the very very latest unsupported development versions and probably be able to get a dom0 up & running but maybe not any domU's yet, or only old ones, or only by using full virtualization (slow) instead of paravirtualization (fast), etc.. or attain Xen godhood to help finish the transition from the original xen patches to ones that the kernel developers will accept and get the various utilities and scripts and installers updated so they work again and update the documentation so that it decribes current reality. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org