Ubuntu 9+ support?

[agathongroup]

I see in the release notes for 2.9 that SCR 3499 is still open, and Ubuntu 9 and 10 are still not supported by the APK. Is there any update on when the APK might support this OS? Are there other ways to generate a Ubuntu 9 or 10 machine image that doesn't use the APK?

Thanks,
Peter

[Jsmart]

Hello,

in this case it is not just the API but a few key kernel changes as well that makes it not work right even in HVM mode.

I will work with the Dev team and see if we can get a scope into what is needed here.

I will get you an update as soon as I can.

Regards,

Jessie

[agathongroup]

Thanks Jessie, I'll wait here. :-)

And a serious helping of kudos for the 2.9.9 release—you guys have (obviously) been working very, very hard! You could call 2.9.9 the "Kid in a Candy Store" release, as there is a lot of great stuff in there. Well done!

[Jsmart]

Peter,

just an intermediate interlude here :) while waiting for engineering to release 2.9 I have been doing a little research on this topic and it looks like there might be a bigger issue here long term.

from what I can see some of these changes in version 9 and what is in version 10 may have been an intentional attempt to lock xen out of Ubuntu.

Networkworld ran an interesting article on how they are trying to remove all of the xen support completely (dated 10/07/10):
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/ubuntu-locks-users-into-amazon-ec2-cloud

now I have found others that just say replacing the kernel with a Debian kernel for DomU resolves the problems also. So this way be a way to workaround the issue for now.

I will keep up with the research on the best way to get support for the 9+ versions and hopefully can give you more info next week.

As I am not an Ubuntu expert please let me know if you have any other thoughts.

--Jessie

[Jsmart]

I am not sure what you are needing here but i did get the following, and it does seem to work:

Here are the steps to get a standard ubuntu kernel in DomU:

1) Get the kernel image, initrd image and modules in the appliance. I used 2.6.32-24-generic-pae that runs on my ubuntu 10.10 box, although looking through the kernel config file for my old ubuntu 8.10 kernel (2.6.27-11) shows that it also has xen domU support (CONFIG_XEN=y), so this is not something new to the ubuntu stock kernels. I have not tried with a kernel other than the one from 10.10

2) do 'depmod -a 2.6.32-24-generic-pae' from within the appliance (or chroot from a filer)

3) edit fstab to replace hda with xvda (thats where I suspect people have had problems)

4) edit grub config to boot from the ubuntu kernel and use xvda instead of hda

4.1) Optional: replace tty1 with hvc0 in /etc/securetty and /etc/inittab in order to get a login prompt on the text console (not really needed with our catalog appliances since we dont allow password login)

5) reboot


you have a working LINUX5 with the ubuntu kernel


please let me know if this helps.

Jessie

[agathongroup]

Jessie (and everyone else),

With some finagling, that worked. I now have a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-based LINUX5-style appliance—not just the kernel, but the whole OS. If anyone else is interested in getting a hold of this appliance, please feel free to contact me: pcg@agathongroup.com.

Thanks!
Peter