XEN Installation Attempt

OMG, the time now is 22:22. This already late for me to go home. The cause is because of Xen failed to compile in my box. Btw, I use Dapper as my distro to create a high performance server.

When I check in the internet, I find many cpus have Fake SCSI causing GNU/Linux systems to fail. Is it the cause? No way, Jose! My box is ain't that cheap! My box, IBM xSeries 225, is build with *REAL* SCSI Controller on PCI Express.

Hmm... is it because Dapper uses GCC 4? Many source code tend to break when compiled because of the strict rules of GCC 4. So, I try to compromise using GCC 3.3 (I think 3.4 should be fine, but it's already done so I stick with GCC 3.3).

# export MAKEFLAGS="CC=gcc-3.3"

And I modify the cflags for optimation:

# export CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -msse2"

OK, the compile seems fine. Wait for few minutes, voila, it stucks!

The culprit?

After googling and analyzing, I've found out that the culprit is Preemptible! Wtf? Yeah! You... for desktops you're amazing, that's because they ain't like my shining baby, the xSeries. They ain't got REAL SMP proc, only hyperthreading.

Man, whose idea to compile SMP support along with Preempt? They should be shot in the head.... Nah, just kiddin'. I turn off the preempt by configuring grub entry:

Kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-27 root=/dev/device-mapper/Rumah ro preempt=no elevator
=deadline

OK, now I can compile cleanly. If you see, I switch the kernel's policy to use deadline and not to use the default, cfq. That's just for precaution.

Up we go!