Hi there,

In Lenny, when installing Xen, grub was giving it priority, and by default,
Debian was booting on the hypervisor. This has changed in Lenny, and even
with the Xen hypervisor installed, Debian boots by default on a non-xen
kernel, without the hypervisor. This behavior could be considered a
regression, and could put some servers in production into some big troubles.

After some talks with Jcristau on IRC, he said that the RT wouldn't hold
Squeeze befcause of that issue, and that I should send this bug report as
release critical. However, when I asked if such a modification would be
allowed to migrate to Squeeze, the answer was "I don't know". So I believe
that there is still a room for change.

It would be very nice if you could tell if you think the change of order is
something you would consider before Squeeze is out. If it's too much of a
big modification, everybody will understand. But at least, I think that some
documentation should be added to tell how to reverte the change.

Anyway, thanks for the work on Grub, even if the above can't get in Squeeze,
Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

For me, it's a grave regression that can put a production environment
into big troubles, and it would deserved a RC for me, but because:
- of Julien's opinion
- that the RT should have the final word
- that I respect this view
- that delaying Squeeze just for this might not be a good idea
- not everyone really cares much about Xen in Debian

... then I sent my report as a wishlist as requested.

However, it would be very appreciated if the Grub maintainers could
consider solving the issue before the release. :)

I would also like to hear what type of modification are involved to make
it a clean way. *Please* let us know asap what's the best solution to
fix. I'd be happy to help if needed.

Another thing I failed to mention and that I wanted to write about. Grub
in fact doesn't only sets the hypervisor at the end of the list, but
choices in the boot menu are totally inverted. Let me explain. To me, it
should be:

- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5-xen with Xen hypervisor
- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5
- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5-xen

But currently, it does:

- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5-xen
- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5
- Debian Linux 2.6.32-5-xen with Xen hypervisor

In other words, when installing Xen, grub will make the kernel with dom0
patch be the default, but without the hypervisor running. This looks a
bit weird, no? :)

Thomas

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 12.12.2010, 14:18 +0800 schrieb Thomas Goirand:

I also agree that this needs to be resolved before the release and in my
opinion this bugs severity should be at least important, if not critical
because it will "break" Xen dom0 functionality of existing systems when
they are upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze.

Of course this could be "fixed" by the user of the package by selecting
an appropriate GRUB_DEFAULT value, but this is likely to break if new
kernel versions are installed.

The appropriate fix is very simple, just rename /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen
to /etc/grub.d/09_linux_xen or some other number in the range of 06-09.

A workaround which will work, even if new kernel versions or grub
upgrades are installed, the user can create a
symlink /etc/grub.d/09_linux_xen wich points
to /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen. (This of course will result in duplicate
grub menuentries for Xen, but should not hurt otherwise.)


Regards,
Thomas

Thomas,

am Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 11:48:56AM +0100 hast du folgendes geschrieben:

are grub1 installations (which were the default for Lenny AFAIK) auto-upgraded
to grub2 during the dist-upgrade?  If not, it shouldn't break existing Xen
dom0s?

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 12.12.2010, 13:10 +0100 schrieb Philipp Kern:

At some point during the release cycle on all my testing machines, grub1
got replaced with grub2, so i assumed that this will still be the case
for Lenny -> Squeeze upgrades.


Regards,
Thomas

I'd prefer this to be decided upstream.  What do people on grub-devel
think?  It does make some sense that the default should be to use Xen if
it's present, IMO.

(See http://bugs.debian.org/606719 for the full history of this bug.)

I'd prefer this to be decided upstream.  What do people on grub-devel
think?  It does make some sense that the default should be to use Xen if
it's present, IMO.

(See http://bugs.debian.org/606719 for the full history of this bug.)

Hello,

Any update on this? I have also run into this issue

Regards,