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Keir Fraser c6b30186cd Disable kernel build in Xen build system. 
Cloning and building a kernel as part of the Xen distribution
implicitly advises that this kernel is the best kernel for all users
and many users appear to be under this impression, even though there
is no fundamental coupling between the Xen distribution and a
particular domain 0 kernel.

There are several choices available for domain 0 kernel, as well as
other user specific variations in requirements e.g. for kernel
configurations. It's not clear that whatever the xen build system
happens to produce (which is really tailored to the needs of the
automated build system) is best for anybody.

Coupling the kernel build with the Xen build has proved problematic
for stable Xen releases as it implicitly blesses the particular kernel
(at a particular point in time) as a constituent part of the Xen
release, while in reality the OS kernels are separate entities with
their own release cycles which may or may not coincide with the
maintenance of Xen stable branches.

Therefore disable the building of a kernel as part of the Xen
distribution by default and instead direct users to use an OS
distribution provided kernel (properly packaged with security updates
via the normal distribution mechanisms etc) where possible and give
pointers to suitable resources providing guidance for cases where it
is not.

This decouples the implicit advice as to the best kernel at any moment
from Xen's own release cycle and removes the implicit suggestion that
only particular domain 0 kernel will do.

The actual infrastructure is left in place since the automated test
system (currently) relies on it (but always asks for the specific
kernel variant it wants for a particular test).

(I also tried to remove Linux-isms from the README's Quick start
guide. In particular I'm not sure what was supposedly Linux specific
about steps 3 and 4 therefore I have removed the suggestion that they
are.)

Signed-off-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com>
2010-09-13 17:31:19 +01:00

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http://www.xen.org/
What is Xen?
============
Xen is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) originally developed by the
Systems Research Group of the University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory, as part of the UK-EPSRC funded XenoServers project. Xen
is freely-distributable Open Source software, released under the GNU
GPL. Since its initial public release, Xen has grown a large
development community, spearheaded by xen.org (http://www.xen.org).
The 4.1 release offers excellent performance, hardware support and
enterprise-grade features such as x86_32-PAE, x86_64, SMP guests and
live relocation of VMs. Ports to Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris
are available from the community.
This file contains some quick-start instructions to install Xen on
your system. For full documentation, see the Xen User Manual. If this
is a pre-built release then you can find the manual at:
dist/install/usr/share/doc/xen/pdf/user.pdf
If you have a source release, then 'make -C docs' will build the
manual at docs/pdf/user.pdf.
Quick-Start Guide
=================
First, there are a number of prerequisites for building a Xen source
release. Make sure you have all the following installed, either by
visiting the project webpage or installing a pre-built package
provided by your OS distributor:
* GCC v3.4 or later
* GNU Make
* GNU Binutils
* Development install of zlib (e.g., zlib-dev)
* Development install of Python v2.3 or later (e.g., python-dev)
* Development install of curses (e.g., libncurses-dev)
* Development install of openssl (e.g., openssl-dev)
* Development install of x11 (e.g. xorg-x11-dev)
* bridge-utils package (/sbin/brctl)
* iproute package (/sbin/ip)
* hotplug or udev
* GNU bison and GNU flex
Second, you need to acquire a suitable kernel for use in domain 0. If
possible you should use a kernel provided by your OS distributor. If
no suitable kernel is available from your OS distributor then refer to
http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenDom0Kernels for suggestions for
suitable kernels to use.
[NB. Unless noted otherwise, all the following steps should be
performed with root privileges.]
1. Download and untar the source tarball file. This will be a
file named xen-unstable-src.tgz, or xen-$version-src.tgz.
You can also pull the current version from the mercurial
repository at http://xenbits.xen.org/
# tar xzf xen-unstable-src.tgz
Assuming you are using the unstable tree, this will
untar into xen-unstable. The rest of the instructions
use the unstable tree as an example, substitute the
version for unstable.
2. cd to xen-unstable (or whatever you sensibly rename it to).
3. For the very first build, or if you want to destroy build trees,
perform the following steps:
# make world
# make install
This will create and install onto the local machine. It will build
the xen binary (xen.gz), the tools and the documentation.
You can override the destination for make install by setting DESTDIR
to some value.
4. To rebuild an existing tree without modifying the config:
# make dist
This will build and install xen, tools, and docs into the local dist/
directory.
You can override the destination for make install by setting DISTDIR
to some value.
make install and make dist differ in that make install does the
right things for your local machine (installing the appropriate
version of hotplug or udev scripts, for example), but make dist
includes all versions of those scripts, so that you can copy the dist
directory to another machine and install from that distribution.
Python Runtime Libraries
========================
Xend (the Xen daemon) has the following runtime dependencies:
* Python 2.3 or later.
In many distros, the XML-aspects to the standard library
(xml.dom.minidom etc) are broken out into a separate python-xml package.
This is also required.
URL: http://www.python.org/
Debian: python, python-xml
* For optional SSL support, pyOpenSSL:
URL: http://pyopenssl.sourceforge.net/
Debian: python-pyopenssl
* For optional PAM support, PyPAM:
URL: http://www.pangalactic.org/PyPAM/
Debian: python-pam
* For optional XenAPI support in XM, PyXML:
URL: http://pyxml.sourceforge.net
YUM: PyXML
Intel(R) Trusted Execution Technology Support
=============================================
Intel's technology for safer computing, Intel(R) Trusted Execution Technology
(Intel(R) TXT), defines platform-level enhancements that provide the building
blocks for creating trusted platforms. For more information, see
http://www.intel.com/technology/security/.
Intel(R) TXT support is provided by the Trusted Boot (tboot) module in
conjunction with minimal logic in the Xen hypervisor.
Tboot is an open source, pre- kernel/VMM module that uses Intel(R) TXT to
perform a measured and verified launch of an OS kernel/VMM.
The Trusted Boot module is available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tboot. This project hosts the code in a
mercurial repo at http://tboot.sourceforge.net/hg/tboot.hg and contains
tarballs of the source. Instructions in the tboot README describe how
to modify grub.conf to use tboot to launch Xen.
There are optional targets as part of Xen's top-level makefile that will
download and build tboot: install-tboot, build-tboot, dist-tboot, clean-tboot.
These will download the latest tar file from the SourceForge site using wget,
then build/install/dist according to Xen's settings.
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