Bug#776450: Xen PVH support for grub-xen in Buster

[Hans van Kranenburg]

On 1/7/19 2:13 PM, Hans van Kranenburg wrote:
> On 1/7/19 12:48 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
>> [...]
> 
>> Would you mind trying out the temporary pvh branch of
>> https://salsa.debian.org/grub-team/grub ?  I'd like to know whether the
>> resulting grub-xen-host binary package does the right thing, when built
>> in the ordinary way (I've test-built this branch using sbuild).
> 
> Sure. I'll have a look at it today.

Ok, I've built it in sid pbuilder.

On dom0 (this is actually a buster one):

-# dpkg -L grub-xen-host |grep bin
/usr/lib/grub-xen/grub-i386-xen.bin
/usr/lib/grub-xen/grub-i386-xen_pvh.bin
/usr/lib/grub-xen/grub-x86_64-xen.bin

In domU I installed grub-xen-bin grub-xen grub2-common grub-common.

Note that:

Installing for x86_64-xen platform.
grub-install: warning: no hints available for your platform. Expect
reduced performance.
Installation finished. No error reported.

...which means that it only has /boot/grub/x86_64-xen with a copy of the
modules. Maybe that's something to think about for the part of the story
that actually expects those modules to be there? Maybe just always throw
all of the three different types in there?

Anyway, the first thing we're testing doesn't rely on that, so let's
continue. In the xen config file, I use...

---- >8 ----
kernel = "/usr/lib/grub-xen/grub-i386-xen_pvh.bin"
type = "pvh"
---- >8 ----

...and yes, blue grub screen and it boots.

Suggestion:

>From usability point of view, it would actually also be nice if
console=hvc0 would be added by default in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
for inside the Xen domU.

The default is now "quiet", but if you remove "quiet", it stays as
quiet, and for a new user, it doesn't have to be super obvious what to
do in this case.

Hans