Description of problem: Here are some proposed changes for Itanium support. In table 2.1 "Host and guest architecture compatibility" which needs to be augmented as mentioned in an earlier IT w/ ia64 support info. The fully virtualized ia64 line should have a footnote which reads: * requires the guest firmware image, see section 4.2 In chapter 4.2 the section entitled "Installing Red Hat Virtualization with yum"; at the end of this paragraph after the command example "To install the xen and kernel-xen packages, run: # yum install xen kernel-xen" add: Full-virtualized guests on ia64 will also need the guest firmware image from the supplementary installation DVD. Alternatively it can be installed from RHN with yum: # yum install xen-ia64-guest-firmware ++++++++++++++++++++++++ To address elilo we propose a whole new chapter: Chapter 25. Configuring ELILO (ia64) ELILO is the bootloader on EFI-based systems, particularly ia64. Like GRUB on i686 and x86_64 systems, ELILO allows the user to select which installed kernel to load at system boot time. It also allows the user to pass arguments to the kernel. The ELILO configuration file (located in the EFI boot partition and symlinked to /etc/elilo.conf) contains a list of global options and image stanzas. When you install the kernel-xen RPM, a post-installs script adds the appropriate image stanza to elilo.conf. The ELILO configuration file has two sections: * Global options that affect the behavior of ELILO and all the entries. Typically there's no need to change these from the default values. * Image stanzas that define a boot selection along with associated options. Here is a sample image stanza in elilo.conf: image=vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.el5xen vmm=xen.gz-2.6.18-92.el5 label=linux initrd=initrd-2.6.18-92.el5xen.img read-only root=/dev/VolGroup00/rhel5_2 append="-- rhgb quiet" The "image" line signals to ELILO that the following lines apply to a single boot selection. This stanza defines a hypervisor ("vmm"), initrd, and command-line arguments ("read-only," "root" and "append") to the hypervisor and kernel. At the ELILO boot line, this stanza can be selected by the label "linux." ELILO translates "read-only" to the kernel command-line option "ro", which causes the root filesystem to be mounted read-only until the OS initscripts remount it read-write. Likewise ELILO copies the "root" line to the kernel command-line. These are merged with the "append" line to build a complete command-line: "-- root=/dev/VolGroup00/rhel5_2 ro rhgb quiet" The double-dash in the command-line indicates the separator between hypervisor arguments and kernel arguments. In the example above, the hypervisor has no arguments (this is typical) and the kernel receives the arguments following the double-dash. (In fact ELILO gives the entire command-line to the hypervisor, which then divides the content and passes the kernel portion to the kernel.) You can customize the hypervisor by inserting parameters to the left of the double-dash. The full list is available <a href="http://tx.downloads.xensource.com/downloads/docs/user/#SECTION04130000000000000000">here</a>. The most common parameters are: mem=xxx Set the hypervisor maximum RAM usage. Any additional RAM in the system will be ignored. The parameter may be specified with a B, K, M or G suffix, representing bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes respectively. The default unit, if no suffix is specified, is kilobytes. dom0_mem=xxx Set the amount of RAM to allocate to dom0. The same suffixes are respected as for the mem parameter above. The default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on ia64 is 4G. dom0_max_vcpus=xxx Set the number of CPUs to allocate to dom0. The default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on ia64 is 4. com1=<baud>,DPS,<io_base>,<irq> Set the parameters for the first serial line, for example com1=9600,8n1,0x408,5. The io_base and irq can be omitted to leave them at their standard defaults. The baud can be "auto" to indicate the bootloader setting should be preserved. Normally com1 should be omitted entirely since serial parameters can be set as global options in ELILO, or even earlier in EFI configuration. com2=<baud>,DPS,<io_base>,<irq> Set the parameters for the second serial line. See com1 above. console=<specifier_list> Comma-separated preference list for the Xen console. Options include vga, com1 and com2. Normally this setting should be omitted since the hypervisor will attempt to inherit EFI console settings. Here's an example modifying the original image stanza with some of the options above: image=vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.el5xen vmm=xen.gz-2.6.18-92.el5 label=linux initrd=initrd-2.6.18-92.el5xen.img read-only root=/dev/VolGroup00/rhel5_2 append="dom0_mem=2G dom0_max_vcpus=2 --" Additionally this example removes the kernel parameters "rhgb quiet" so that kernel and initscript output are generated on the console. Note the double-dash remains so that the append line is correctly interpreted as hypervisor arguments.
Target ETA for completion and republishing the Virtualization is June 5th.
Verifying that content is publically available. Note that style sheet is missing from the page and I will follow up a request to fix that separately. http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.2/html/Virtualization/chap-Virtualization-Configuring_ELILO.html Also it is on page 227 http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.2/pdf/Virtualization/Virtualization.pdf Setting bug to resolved