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Xen horror, just upgraded my box to Squeeze

Posted by Wilmer van der Gaast on
Of course I could just not upgrade, but I'd have to do it sooner or later anyway..

It looks like Xen, now that it's owned by Citrix, also suffers from the XML manager syndrome. At least the extremely annoying clock bug was fixed, which means I get >4ms precision in timing again.

Just dumping this here in my blog since more people seem to have this problem and aren't getting very helpful answers so far. Or maybe I just didn't try the right Google queries..

This:
hypnotoad:/tmp# xm suspend bijtje
Error: Domain is not managed by Xend lifecycle support.
Usage: xm suspend <DomainName>
Suspend a Xend managed domain
means you're not using the shiny new (whatever the purpose is) lifecycle tool that keeps track of domain configs and other stuff in /var/lib/xend/domains/$UUID/. You can use "xm new" to set this up, except this is broken on Debian:
hypnotoad:/tmp# xm new
Unexpected error: <type 'exceptions.ImportError'>
...
ImportError: No module named xmlproc
This, my dear reader, means that Debian's shipping Xen utils that depend on a Python XML module that was actually removed from Debian since it's not maintained by upstream anymore.

So I was just trying to figure out how to make this all go, and then I realised:
hypnotoad:/tmp# xm save bijtje bijtje.sav
hypnotoad:/tmp# xm restore bijtje.sav
Oh look! I can still do it. I just have to tell Xen where to save the statefile.

So in short:
  • Xen is also suffering from XML-itus
  • Debian drops packages that other packages still depend on
  • Use "xml save", not "xml suspend"

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Nakarti on :

Yes but it also breaks more useful features like having a domain start automatically if dom0 crashed and was not previously running. Or am I off-base on how to do that? Still pisses me off that I found the debian thread dropping python-xml, somebody explained it was a runtime dependency not build, and they dropped it anyway! I have to use Ubuntu sources to get all packages I need!

Wilmer on :

I think you can do that by putting the .cfg file into /etc/xen/auto ?

I must add that I've learned to use Xen in 2005 and haven't updated my knowledge on it much since then ... but it mostly still just works. :-)

Jonah on :

Hi Wilmer,

I think I found a better solution to fix the problem:

http://www.rootdamnit.eu/2012/06/07/xen-and-debian-6-xm-new-returns-error/

Hope that helps.

J

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