Getting OpenSUSE’s Xen ‘Kernel of The Day’ on other Distro’s

Getting the latest (mainline) Linux kernel is easy, you just head over to kernel.org and click the first ‘Full Source’ link that you see. When it comes to Xen, it’s so hard that even the official Xen Wiki can’t really find a simple download and configuration link.

After running Andrew Lyon’s Gentoo patches for Xen kernel for quite a while on my Archlinux install, it’s unstability instability on my work machine (which can mainly be tracked down to Kernel Mode Setting issues inside the kernel code).

I have faced two ways to fix the issues I have been having on this particular machine: either fix the kernel code with the KMS patches (linked to above) or try a newer version of the OpenSUSE patches.

I have tried on and off the KMS patches, but either the build always fails somewhere or the machine simply will reboot just before Dom0 loads. To fix the issue, I have simply gone to rebuild a new kernel from OpenSUSE’s KoTD source.

Recorded here is the quick hacky steps taken to get the kernel building on my machine:

1. Download the kernel-source rpm from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/master/src/
2. Extract the RPM.

   [tim@myhost ~]$ pacman -Qo `which rpmextract.sh`
   /usr/bin/rpmextract.sh is owned by rpmextract 1.0-4
   

3. for x in `find | grep \.bz2 `; do tar -xvf $x; done

4. for p in $(./guards $(./arch-symbols) < series.conf | grep -v ia64); do
       echo "--> $p"
       patch -d linux-2.6.35 -p1 < $p || break
   done

5. cp config/x86_64/xen linux-2.6.35/.config

6. cd linux-2.6.35

7. make oldconfig

8. make

Will it fix all my complaints that I have about my current kernel? Who knows, but I hope it does!