[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#578173: kernel

[IAN DELANEY]

Hello Guido,

some more info, well, a suggestion re this bug, re the recurrent console issue on lenny other.
These two lennys are not so identical.  The do have some significant variations.  The important one, the kernel.
Note I mentioned in the other bug you closed, re the vnc console reporting not configured for guest, I used an imported kernel, a gentoo kernel.  On the lenny other that I installed many months agon from a dvd, on booting into xen, it failed.  You can find my only entry on the debian forum that describes it.  I actually got one user answer me on the thread, and in attempting to offer help, he also installed xen and booted into xen and drew the same bug.  I'd call it a bug.  From memory, something could not mmap the framebuffer, something like that.  I can reboot that kernel in that lenny any time to repeat it.  So I got to experiement with lenny on

idella at debian:~$ uname -a
Linux debian 2.6.31-xen-r10AMD-64 #15 SMP Sat Feb 6 20:21:00 WST 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 which is the system I am in and the kernel running this lenny.  Over a few months, I actually improved it a few times so it's very well equipped now, however it may be the source of this bug.

The backport packages are supposed to resolve it, but they don't on this lenny.  The problem appears to be failure to allocate a /dev/pts/ file to the serial console Source path, a kernel activity.

Now this is where it gets interesting.  The second lenny is an install of the live xen cd.  It uses the same xen kernel, lenny edition, 2.6.26.  So I tried booting up this first lenny using the kernel of the xen cd derived instance, and surprise suprise, it couldn't do it.  About one second into the boot it kernel panicked, reported 

  elf_init : not and ELF binary, and promptly rebooted.  

I would expect to be able to copy the kernel over and have it boot.  No need to copy anything.  Both have the content, but they don't match. 
Now to complicate things, you at debian in your wisdom decided to refrain from providing the xen kernel source in lenny packages. Why was this so?  That's why I had to resort to importing a gentoo kernel, which I compiled from scratch.  I can't see the kernel being completely broken since it works fine in the xen live cd, so I'm puzzled that the kernels aren't interchangeable.  After all, I had the gentoo xen kernel running gentoo and lenny and karmic.  As an adjunct, squeeze also refarians from providing a xen kernel.  What's going on here?  The gentoo kernel is next to run squeeze, or I could uses Suse's,  but gentoo's is far more user friendly and perfectly equipped.

Now I wasn't going to mention this but here it may be relevant.  Dealing with Ubuntu develper's lead to discovering a gap in my xen kernel in karmic, so I found something that needed adding.  It may be so here.  That's why the first choice was to fix the lenny xen kernel.  It had a bug re the framebuffer device, which is simple and straight forward to address.

Anyway, take it as you will.  I've included the kernel config in case you may consider it.
 		 	   		  
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