Re: vifs not working?

[Sarton O'Brien <bsd-xen%roguewrt.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 23 May 2008 09:42:50 am der Mouse wrote:
> >> Error: Device 0 (vif) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not 
working.
> 
> >> This despite specifying "script=/usr/bin/true" on the network-attach
> >> command line.
> 
> > I think your "script" is too simplistic. :)
> 
> Apparently so.  That was based on the vif-bridge script in the xen
> howto, which does ifconfig and brconfig commands but none of the
> xenstore-* stuff.
> 
> > I guess you'll need tot do at least something like the xenstore-write
> > line in the vif-ip script that comes with the xentools pkg.
> 
> This turns out to be correct.  The script named in the script= line on
> the xm network-attach command is run with arguments
> /local/domain/0/backend/vif/8/1 and 4.  The script that comes with the
> xentools stuff does nothing in this case; it expects 6 or 2 as the
> second argument.  (Of course, the semantics of this magic number are
> completely undocumented.)  But running
> 
> dom0# xenstore-write /local/domain/0/backend/vif/8/1/hotplug-status 
connected
> 
> manually makes the xm network-attach command exit, and the xennet and
> vif interfaces now stick around.
> 
> So that the scripts that come with the package don't even work as-is,
> and can't work without divining undocumented values pased by an
> undocumented but critical program, and requires the running of another
> undocumented program to get basic functionality working.  I'm...well,
> I'm pretty impressed by xen to begin with, but quite disappointed in
> the package and related stuff.

That's cool that you got it going, it would have easily been a few wasted 
hours for me to poke around. Unfortunately there are only a couple of people 
working on xen so the functionality has progressed slowly in certain areas.

> (I've been using the 2008Q1 packages, 
> on the theory that that's the closest approximation to in sync with
> 4.0; do newer xen packages (a) work with 4.0 and (b) fix things?)

There's an incompatibility between the latest xentools and the 4.0 release 
kernels. So it's current or release but nothing in between :( ... well 
reliably anyway.

Sarton