Xen Installation & Compilation

Installation from source

Xen 4.0 source code mercurial (hg) repository and changelog: http://xenbits.xen.org/xen-4.0-testing.hg

You can get Xen 4.0 with mercurial using the following command:

hg clone http://xenbits.xen.org/xen-4.0-testing.hg

Note that this will give you the LATEST version in xen-4.0-testing.hg repository! It might be a release candidate for next release or just some developer snapshot. See the changelog above for current status. You can also get a specific 'tag' from the repository like this:

hg clone -r RELEASE-4.0.1 http://xenbits.xen.org/xen-4.0-testing.hg

Alternatively you can download the Xen 4.0.x source tarball from http://www.xen.org/products/xen_source.html . Note that if you're planning to use Xen 4.0.0 tarball please see the Known Issues below for a note about supported pvops dom0 kernel versions.

NOTE!! during the Xen build process outbound git-protocol needs to be open in your network firewall! Xen build scripts need to access git:// repositories on git.kernel.org and xenbits.xen.org. Some people have reported issues accessing the remote repositories - these problems are most often caused by a broken Internet connection, broken firewall, or a broken NAT router you use.

This example will only build the new Xen 4.0 hypervisor and tools. This method does NOT download or build a (dom0) kernel from the xen.git repository. "make tools" part will download the xen qemu-dm ioemu for hvm guests from xenbits git repository and tools tarballs (unless you've already downloaded them yourself before building).

cd xen-4.0-testing.hg 
make xen 
make tools 
make stubdom

When the compilation process finishes you'll have the Xen hypervisor/tools binaries in "dist/" directory ready for installation:

make install-xen 
make install-tools 
make install-stubdom

And then compile your chosen new dom0 kernel, or use your existing dom0 kernel. Also update grub.conf to use the newly installed Xen 4.0 hypervisor.

See XenDom0Kernels wiki page for information about all the available Xen Dom0 capable kernels, and XenParavirtOps wiki page for more detailed information about Xen pvops dom0 kernels.

You can also compile Xen 4.0 together with the new default pvops dom0 kernel (Linux 2.6.32.x in Xen 4.0.1 and newer versions). This method downloads the kernel sources from xen.git repository during the build process:

make world

This will download the latest pvops dom0 kernel 2.6.32.x from Jeremy's xen.git repository during the build process. See the XenParavirtOps wiki page for more information about different pvops dom0 kernel versions. Also see the Known Issues below for supported pvops dom0 kernel versions.

NOTE about the old Xenlinux linux-2.6.18-xen kernels:

make kernels KERNELS="linux-2.6-xen0 linux-2.6-xenU"