Hi Joop,
On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 10:33:41AM +0200, Joop Boonen wrote:
I'm thinking of buying a GA-M57SLI-S4 mainboard. As AMD-V isn't activated in the BIOS I probably want to use LinuxBIOS.
You mean virtualization? What makes you think that it is disabled on the m57sli-s4?
As i want to use virtualisation i would like to know if LinuxBIOS also supports Xen i.e. I use a Xen aware kernel in LinuxBIOS that works.
It does, but you have to either:
a) build LinuxBIOS with grub2 (which I have not tested yet, but is on my todo list) b) start a kexec-enabled kernel from filo and then kexec into the Xen kernel (which is how I've got some machines in production). You could boot the kexec-enabled kernel from disk, or you could put it in the rom chip (which would make the machine boot faster).
The problem is that filo - the current 'standard' linuxbios bootloader - does not support ELF modules; xen requires that to start up.
I have a patch pending to buildrom that makes it really easy to build a linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB) image with a kexec-enabled kernel in the rom chip (you need a 1MB chip; the m57sli comes with a 512KB chip). Hopefully I'll be able to apply it today or tomorrow (I'm a bit short on time right now), and then I'll also update the m57sli howto on the wiki.
I would like to use LinuxBIOS in combination with OpenSuSE.
That should not be a problem. Any modern distro should work.
Thanks, Ward.