Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

To reduce the costs involved in developing a working AMI for Amazon’s EC2, I’ve been rebuilding my local dual-Xeon box to run Xen. The instructions on the unofficial Gentoo Wiki worked a treat:

rahvin ~ # uname -a
Linux rahvin 2.6.16.28-xen #3 SMP Mon Sep 11 21:23:30 BST  i686 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz GNU/Linux
rahvin ~ # xm list
Name                              ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State  Time(s)
Domain-0                           0      128     4 r-----   903.9

Next step is to getting a working generic Gentoo Xen image built, which can then be used as the template for the LAMP Server image (and more!).

Things Learned About AMI

• The Amazon EC2 domU kernel (the one that AMIs have to work with) has been built with PAE enabled. If you’re building a local Xen test box, make sure that you enable the ‘pae’ USE flag for app-emulation/xen, and that you build your dom0 kernel with PAE enabled.

Things Added To The TODO List

• Package up Amazon’s AMI tools for Gentoo (thanks to Harris)
• Add the kernel modules from Amazon’s domU kernel into the generic Gentoo Xen image
• Learn catalyst, and produce a stage3-i686-2006.1-xen.tgz tarball (anyone interested in doing this?)
• Upgrade the RAM on the Xen test box to 2GB