Latitude D820 +Virtualization

[Victor Lowther]

On 11/18/06, Art Fore <art.fore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 11:09 -0600, Victor Lowther wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 11/18/06, Art Fore <art.fore at gmail.com> wrote:
> >         I Purchased as new D820 w/T7600 Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gig
> >         ram 3
> >         weeks ago with the intent of using Xen virtualization under
> >         Linux to run
> >         WinXP under Linux. The reason for purchasing this machine was
> >         that I had
> >         read many articles on the internet thhat this model had
> >         virtualization
> >         capabilities built in. So far, that seems to be false.
> >
> > Stupid question, I know, but have you tried following the instructions
> > at
> > http://www.xensource.com/files/xen_install_windows.pdf ?
>
>
> Yes, tried this. It was a catastrophe. Apparently the mkinitrd command
> is different for different distros and it screwed up my system so bad I
> hand to reinstall. (three times)

Hmmm in that case, you may want to either build Xen from source or use
the Xen packages provided by the distro.

Anyone know if FC6 has Xen packages?  I know SuSE 10 does, but not so
sure about FC6.

>
> [FAIL]  EDD Boot disk hinting
> F Boot device 0x80 does not support EDD
>
> [FAIL] DSD AML verification
> [FAIL] FADT test
> F E820: XSDT (0xc7b29301000) is not in reserved or ACPI memory!
>   ACPI mode, SCI_EM bit in PM1a_Control register is correctly enabled.
> [FAIL] General aCPI information
> FACPI table I: TC has aninvalid checksum
>    DSDT was compiled by the Intel AMLcompiler
> [FAIL] MCFG PCIExpress* memory mapped config space
> F E8200 XSDT (0xc7b29301000) is not in reserved or ACPI memory!
>   PCI config space verified
>   MCFG table foundat address 0x7fe82fc0 size is 18 bytes (1 entries
> [FAIL] HPET configuration test
> w HPET driver in the kernel is enabled, inaccurate results follow.
> F Mismatched HPET basse between DSDT and the kernel
> [WARN} ACPI passive thermal trip points
> W Zone THM doesn't support passive trippointat all.
> [WARN} CPU frequency scaling tests
> w Frequency scaling not supported.
> [INFO} Processor C state support
>  Processor 1 reached all C-states
>  Processor 0 has not reaced C2 during tests.

Where do these errors come from?  They look like they come from the
Xen hypervisor, but I cannot tell for sure just by reading them.

>
> Will try the VMware, but don't have much hope with the luck I have had
> with this machine.

QEMU (at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) may also be an option
-- IIRC, it is part of the Fedora Extras package set in Fedora, and is
the least intrusive (it does not require any kernel modifications to
work), but it has the highest performance penalty.

If you are comfortable with building you own kernels and do not mind
living on the bleeding edge of development, the project at
http://kvm.sourceforge.net/ may be a viable alternative to Xen or
VMWare. It adds kernel support for hardware virtualization and patches
QEMU to use the new kernel hardware virtualization support.

> Art

Victor Lowther
Data Analyst @ Dell, Linux Enthusiast
victor_lowther at dell.com <-- work email
victor.lowther at gmail.com <-- home email