[Pkg-xen-devel] [Xen-users] Serial Passthrough broken in Debian Wheezy?

[Jonas Meurer]

Hey again,

Am 13.05.2013 17:58, schrieb Jonas Meurer:
> I just discovered a strange bug with serial passthrough in xen 4.1 on
> Debian Wheezy. The Dom0 has a GSM modem connected to serial port. The
> serial port is passed through to a DomU with options 'irq = [ 4 ]' 
> and
> 'ioports = [ '3f8-3ff ]'.

While searching the list archives I found out, that latest Xen 4.1 has
several issues with passthrough. But so far it seems to me like nobody
else described my exact issue before. Apparently, the other passthrough
issues have been introduced by a hypervisor update. My problem appeared
after a kernel upgrade. And for me, DomU creation still works. As
described, the passed through serial even exists in DomU. Only it
doesn't behave as expected.

Just wanted to share those additional observations.

Kind regards,
  jonas

>
> This worked as expected on Debian Squeeze with Xen 4.0 and Linux 
> kernel
> 2.6.32 (both for Dom0 and DomU). On Debian Wheezy with Xen 4.1 and
> Linux kernel 3.2.0 the passthrough seems to work as well (/dev/ttyS0
> appears in dmesg of DomU), but something is wrong. The GSM modem
> doesn't behave as expected. The smstools daemon errors out with 
> 'Cannot
> open serial port /dev/ttyS0, error: Function not implemented'.
>
> It took me hours to find the difference, but it seems like the guest
> (domU) kernel is the problem. The setup keeps working when Dom0 is
> upgraded to Debian Wheezy with Xen 4.1 and linux kernel 3.2.0. It 
> even
> keeps working if the DomU userland is upgraded to Debian Wheezy. Only
> if I upgrade the DomU linux kernel to 3.2.0 from Wheezy as well,
> smstools stops working.
>
> I don't expect this to be a smstools bug. More likely, something
> regarding serial pass through functions of xen is broken in 3.2.0
> kernel from Debian Wheezy.
>
> Did anybody else discover similar issues yet?
>
> Kind regards,
>  jonas
>
> PS: I'm not subscribed to pkg-xen-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org, 
> please
> cc me on that list.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users at lists.xen.org
> http://lists.xen.org/xen-users