Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

digitalc4 · Joined: 10 May 2006 Posts: 4

Can anyone give me an idea for what it would take to get puppy linux running under a XEN instance?

I'm guessing it isn't as simply as swapping out the kernel with a xen kernel because of all the customizations?

rarsa · Posted: Wed 10 May 2006, 13:48 Post subject:

I'd recommend first trying creating a virtual image of the distro that provides your XEN (Fedora, SuSE, etc).

That way you will be able to follow the step by step instructions provided by the distro contributors.

After that it should be fairly easy to get a puppy image as a puppy install only consists on copying 4 files.

Beware that to even start playing with XEN you'll need at least 1 GB RAM.

digitalc4 · Joined: 10 May 2006 Posts: 4

I'm familar with XEN and running it on the SUSE and RH distros. The problem I have is building guest kernel's. To run a XEN guest you need the guest os to either 1) have the XEN linux kernel extensions or 2) you need hardware virtualization support.

As I don't have #2 I need to modify puppy such that it uses the Xen kernel instead of the regular kernel. The problem is that I don't know exactly what that entails. The puppy linux stuff has a fairly tweaked kernel so it's not something that is easy to replace. I was wondering if anyone had tried this or understood it enough to give me a heads up on the best way to go about it.

ted142 · Joined: 18 Aug 2006 Posts: 10 Location: State of Liberty

Since latest kernel is near vanilla--might not be that hard to compile a xen-kernel with the correct patches for puppy. Barry talks about boulding the latest puppy kernel being quite simple these days. I compiled a xen kernel for ttylinux but nothing more elaborate yet. There's a vmware project going on now as well. "vm puppy"