I was somewhat surprised to find that this is non-trivial.
The xensource hg repository contains a directory called unmodified_drivers. To be polite, the instructions for building these are woefully incomplete. Also, pulling down the entire xen source code to build a couple of drivers is a pain in the backside.
In essence, what you need to do is as follows:
- Grab a recent kernel source from kernel.org. I used 2.6.32.11.
- Find a set of patches to xenify it (I used Andrew Lyon’s Gentoo patches).
- Configure the kernel in non-Xen mode (i.e. a normal kernel, with the options you would want for full HVM).
- Build the kernel.
- Build the PV drivers.
I have simplified this process as follows:
- I wrote a little script to patch the kernel (more accurately, I adopted and adapted a perfectly useful script from Boris Derzhavets).
- I pulled the unmodified_drivers directory out of the rest of the Xen source tree, fixed a bug in a Makefile, wrote a build script, and put it in its own .tgz.
So now what you need to do is as follows (I’m building on Ubuntu Lucid, but it doesn’t much matter):
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wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.32.11.tar.bz2 tar xvjf linux–2.6.32.11.tar.bz2 cd linux–2.6.32.11 wget http://www.alex.org.uk/pvdrivers-0.01.tgz tar xvzf pvdrivers–0.01.tgz wget http://gentoo-xen-kernel.googlecode.com/files/xen-patches-2.6.32-1.tar.bz2 pvdrivers–0.01/xenify.sh xen–patches–2.6.32–1.tar.bz2 # Use a normal HVM config *NOT* a Xen config cp /boot/config–`uname –r` .config make menuconfig (exit) make localmodconfig (accept defaults) make –j 9 cd pvdrivers–0.01 ./build.sh |
And that should be it. In case you are wondering where pvdrivers-0.01.tgz came from, here’s roughly how you make it:
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cd pvdrivers hg clone http://xenbits.xen.org/xen-4.0-testing.hg cd xen–4.0–testing.hg # Fix duff makefile perl –pi –e ‘s/ vbd.o$/ vbd.o vcd.o/’ unmodified_drivers/linux–2.6/blkfront/Kbuild # Remove the unneeded Xen Source code ls –1 | egrep –v ‘unmodified|COPYING’ | xargs rm –rf rm –rf .hg cd .. |
You’ll then need to add the two shell scripts I wrote (or your own equivalent). The main surprises here are:
- The XL environment variable needs to point to a kernel source tree with a configured and built xenified kernel in, but one which has not been configured for Xen.
- The XEN environment variable does not need to point to a Xen source tree. Instead it needs to point to include/xen within the Linux tree.
The 3.3-testing PV drivers do not build (though it’s an easy fix, one of the hypervisor includes has moved). However, PV drivers built using this package (from 4.0-testing) seem to work just fine with older versions of Xen, so there’s not a lot of point in bothering.
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