Re: trouble with debian guest

[Jed Davis <jld%panix.com@localhost>]

Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost> writes:

> I used jailtime.org ubuntu and debian pre-built images, and those
> basically worked ok.  But, the provided xenconfig file has
>
>   root="/dev/sda1 ro"
>
> This is mysterious in two ways, one of which is wrong:
>
>   It's sda1 instead of xvda (apparently xvd is the Linux analog of xbd,
>   but it's not used consistently.

In earlier times, disks were passed in to domUs accompanied by a device
number; a Linux domU would make the virtual disk appear at that device
number (which might be an "sd" or an "hd" or...), while NetBSD would
ignore the suggested device number and just attach an xbd.  That seems
to have changed, but I guess older images might still be doing things
the old way?

>   With ro, xen at least partially disallows writes to the image file.
>   The linux kernel logs errors, and some changes aren't saved.  But some
>   were.

I thought that the "ro" in that meant that the root filesystem would be
initially mounted read-only by the Linux domU kernel -- the same thing
it means when it appears in the Linux kernel arguments outside of Xen.

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