Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

[Zir Blazer]

A year or so ago I had done a near identical guide in spanish, to make installing Xen more accessible to hispanic people. However, I figured out that pretty much everyone which was interesed in it, didn't had the proper Hardware to try Passthrough, and anyone who does, should have no issues understanding english in the first place, so my efforts weren't worth it. I didn't initially thought of doing it in english since there were already some quite complete guides, but they were for other Linux distros, and at this point, they're a bit dated, so I missed most of the possible spotlight for not choosing the correct language:

Dizzy guide for Fedora: http://www.overclock.net/t/1205216/guide-create-a-gaming-virtual-machine/
powerhouse guide for Linux Mint: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=112013
Teo En Ming guide for Ubuntu: Somewhere at xen-users
I think I forgot another one.

Zir Blazer's "Me too" guide for Arch Linux: http://pastebin.com/rzqw6Vfa

Part of the idea is to not make a guide that is "install this, do that", but something that you can learn criteria from. So the end result is that my guide is totally biased, well, on how I do things.

What to expect:

- It is a 135 KiB wall of text, approaching binary blob complexity. In order to understand it, you may need to reverse engineer it.
- It is totally biased on my criteria and usage style.
- It is politically incorrect, since I'm sitting on the root user all the day and most Linux users seems to not like that. But if you follow my guide, you will do it, too!
- It may be factually incorrect, since there are a few things which I may have explained wrong
- It is incomplete, since there are some things that I still didn't learned how to do, so I can't explain. An example is a lot of Openbox related config
- It is inconsistent, since some things I explain as detailed as I can, while I skip doing so totally in other areas
- It is in engrish, since I didn't did a slowly paced read to figure out that all the syntaxis and verbs are correct. Try to look around for memetizable "All your base belong to us" phrases.
- I rushed it to completion, since I wanted to publish it ASAP and get some feedback to see if it is worth continuing it or not. You can notice it near the end.
- It doesn't includes any Passthrough instructions at all!

The guide at the current stage is a sort of rollercoaster, but if you follow it carefully, will take you in a walkthrough style from an empty Hard Disk to a functional Arch Linux Dom0 with Xen 4.5 installed, with two simple exercises at the end that includes creating VMs with no storage to see that SeaBIOS and OVMF boots. There are also some mention on how to create a VM to test a nested Xen, so you can try my guide in a Xen VM (Which is what I did to make sure it works).

TO DO:

- Make it more consistent and easily readable. Could be useful to try to migrate it to a Wiki with screenshots.
- I missed everything related to SPICE. The qxl VGA driver should be extremely useful. Also, I don't use VNC at all, just SDL. So it is lacking in remote management.
- Adding Passthrough instructions (Is not that checking the PCI Address of a device with lspci, adding a line for xen-pciback in the Boot Loader config file, and adding the pci line in the DomU config file is THAT hard if you survived to the end)
- Adding instructions to enable Xen debug, since as the Arch Linux install I use is quite minimal, it makes for an excellent debug platform for Passthrough, as you have less variables. I expect that I can make out of this guide an standarized procedure to make a setup to get logs from in case of regressions.


 		 	   		  

Re: Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2015-04-08 at 12:53 -0300, Zir Blazer wrote:

> Zir Blazer's "Me too" guide for Arch Linux:
> http://pastebin.com/rzqw6Vfa

I'm not an Arch linux user, but this sort of thing is IMHO rather
useful.

Perhaps consider publishing it somewhere more permanent and adding a
link from http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Arch_Linux ?

If you don't have anywhere else to publish then it seems that the wiki
allows subpages of ones User:foo page e.g.
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Users:Ijc/Subpage . The doc looks sufficiently
personal to you that I'm not sure you'd want to put it in the main part
of the wiki, although you could if you want.

Ian.

Re: [Xen-users] FW: Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2015-04-15 at 00:14 -0300, Zir Blazer wrote:
> New version of the guide. Corrected a lot of things, checked syntax,
> and added what I know so far of IOMMU Groups, with a deep dive in my
> Supermicro X10SAT topology. There are also Passthrough instructions.
> But most important of all - MORE THAN 60 SCREENSHOTS! The next step
> should be to wikify it.
> 
> I still need feedback and at least a tester. If you have computer that
> you want to repurpose for Xen (Doesn't neccesarily needs an IOMMU,
> since that's merely for Passthrough), you can give it a try.

Perhaps you should try the arch linux lists or forums or whatever?

> 
> http://secure-web.cisco.com/1XIePxGT4k2pVYpvfoExDscE7K-N4ta3NYEe8_vOdJt3JlmEo48iELv385Cs-v5NBbmlsyuSUfZsKj8GQ5sJ163bWqP8PoNB4WfMmVBfgMZTwY3pr0uNHd0qGx-L5J59WD08xUv95nfqnA43cOWmjIhnIhl-R_woYqEmOIWHWZ3ouFmPjCCZMP3YLaY1DvPw3/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pastebin.com%2FAfxgyZNq
> 
> Due to Hotmail limit of 50 attached files, I can't upload them all in
> one go. I need to figure out if I can upload them to an album instead.
> Will have that in mind for the next update.

If you are going to rework this then please find some other way to
distribute than sending dozens of images to the list (which is a breach
of netiquette IMHO) and provide a link to something instead.

Ian.

Re: [Xen-users] FW: Zir Blazer's guide to install Arch Linux and Xen - need feedback

[Magnus Therning]

On 15 April 2015 at 18:50, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-04-15 at 00:14 -0300, Zir Blazer wrote:
>> New version of the guide. Corrected a lot of things, checked syntax,
>> and added what I know so far of IOMMU Groups, with a deep dive in my
>> Supermicro X10SAT topology. There are also Passthrough instructions.
>> But most important of all - MORE THAN 60 SCREENSHOTS! The next step
>> should be to wikify it.
>>
>> I still need feedback and at least a tester. If you have computer that
>> you want to repurpose for Xen (Doesn't neccesarily needs an IOMMU,
>> since that's merely for Passthrough), you can give it a try.
>
> Perhaps you should try the arch linux lists or forums or whatever?

There is a whole lot of text that only really concerns installation of
Arch.  I personally don't really see the point of that part since the
Arch installation docs are excellent already.  It may very well be
that you add some information on top of what's already on the Arch
Wiki, but please consider de-bundling it from the Xen stuff.

The stuff relating to installing Xen are good and clear.  I still
haven't read the articles on the Arch Wiki related to Xen, but having
an "opinionated example" is a good thing.  (I suspect the Arch Wiki is
written in more general terms, in which case your document can serve
as a real-world example, sort of like an instance of a template.)

If you want the text to be more easily consumable I think it needs a
bit of basic layouting, e.g. markdown or putting it on the Arch Wiki
(I liked Ian's suggestion of using your own user's page).  The text
suggests it's targeting Windows users who adventure into Linux in
order to explore virtualisation, so maybe some Windows-related site
might be an even better fit?

In any case *I* think the text relating to Xen is good and clear
enough to move the discussion to some other community, Arch, Windows,
...  That way you'll get feedback from your target group instead of
from Xen zealots. :)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus@therning.org   jabber: magnus@therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus