Unable to boot with the dom0 xen kernel

[Gustau Pérez]

   Hi Roger,
>>> If you don't have a serial console you
>>> should use console=vga in your xen_cmdline. Additionally if you have a
>>> usb debug port you could use that as console with console=dbgp [1].
>>    Thank you. I did not have a console at $home (the laptop has no
>> physical serial port) but at $work my laptop dockstation provides me
>> with a physical serial port. I'll try to use it.

   Well, my current laptop (Dell latitude E6430) and the previous one
(Fujitsu Lifebook) have that. I'd say that even an old D630 laptop had
that option. It is quite useful.
> I didn't know there were dock stations that provided serial ports even
> when the laptop didn't have them, that's something worth a try. If not
> just setting console=vga ought to provide some output. If that also
> fails please write back and I will provide a patch for the bootloader in
> order to try to figure out what's going on.
>
> Roger.

   I added a new test machine. I'll show my results with this one (I'll
report my laptop results later).

   The new machine is

            Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           L5520  @ 2.27GHz

   EPT and IOMMU are there:

       [root at hast16 ~/xen]# dmesg|grep EPT
        VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,VPID
      [root at hast16 ~/xen]# acpidump -t | grep DMAR
       DMAR: Length=432, Revision=1, Checksum=213,

   First I tried xen and xen-tools from ports (version 4.5, hoping those
were enought). The boot failed, he error says iommu is not enabled. The
complete log is here:

        http://dpaste.com/0KCGGW7

   so I switched to git version instead. The error was the same. I
suspect this is the reason:

        (XEN) [VT-D]Disabling IOMMU due to Intel 5500/5520/X58 Chipset
errata #47, #53

   According to the article [1] it is possible to prevent interruption
remapping. I added iommu=no-intremap (it is listed in [2]), it appears
the xen kernel is happy with that, but then the domain0 FreeBSD kernel
panics:

        http://dpaste.com/3TJYYDQ

   Gustau

   [1] http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136517
   [2]
http://xenbits.xenproject.org/docs/unstable/misc/xen-command-line.html

   PS: I'd like to talk about the behavior of the xen_cmdline reboot
option. Setting it "no" causes the machine to stop (which is fine) but
the machine remains there. Perhaps it'd be good to allow to reboot the
machine by pressing a key when in panic. Otherwise you have physically
reboot the machine.
 
          

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O O O Gustau Pérez i Querol
O O O Unitat de Gestió dels departaments
O O O Matemàtica Aplicada IV i Enginyeria Telemàtica

      Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
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