UPDATE: the canonical location for this information is now here - please check there, as it will be updated as necessary, unlike this blog entry.

As a final part to my entries on OpenSolaris and Xen, let's go through the steps needed to turn OpenSolaris into a dom0. Thanks to Trevor O for documenting this for 2008.05. And as before, expect this process to get much, much, easier soon!

I'm going to do the work in a separate BE, so if we mess up, we shouldn't have broken anything. So, first we create our BE:

$ pfexec beadm create -a -d xvm xvm

First, let's install the packages. If you've updated to the development version, a simple pkg install xvm-gui will work, but let's assume you haven't:

$ pfexec beadm mount xvm /tmp/xvm-be
$ pfexec pkg -R /tmp/xvm-be install SUNWvirt-manager SUNWxvm SUNWvdisk SUNWvncviewer
$ pfexec beadm umount xvm

Now we need to actually reboot into Xen. Unfortunately beadm is not yet aware of how to do this, so we'll have to hack it up. We're going to run some awk over the menu.lst file which controls grub:

$ awk '
/^title/ { xvm=0; }
/^title.xvm$/ { xvm=1; }
/^(splashimage|foreground|background)/ {
    if (xvm == 1) next
}
/^kernel\$/ {
    if (xvm == 1) {
       print("kernel\$ /boot/\$ISADIR/xen.gz")
       sub("^kernel\\$", "module$")
       gsub("console=graphics", "console=text")
       gsub("i86pc", "i86xpv")
       $2=$2 " " $2
    }
}
{ print }' /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst >/var/tmp/menu.lst.xvm

Let's check that the awk script (my apologies) worked properly:

$ tail /var/tmp/menu.lst.xvm 
...
#============ End of LIBBE entry =============
title xvm
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/xvm
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,console=text
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
#============ End of LIBBE entry =============

Looks good. We'll move it into place, and reboot:

$ pfexec cp /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst.saved
$ pfexec mv /var/tmp/menu.lst.xvm /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst
$ pfexec reboot

This should boot you into xVM. If everything worked OK, let's enable the services:

$ svcadm enable -r xvm/virtd ; svcadm enable -r xvm/domains

At this point, you should be able to merrily go ahead and install domains!

Update: Todd Clayton pointed out the issue I've filed here: SUNWxvm needs to depend on SUNWvdisk. I've updated the instructions above with the workaround.

Update update: Rich Burridge has fixed it. Nice!

Tags: OpenSolaris Xen xVM