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The Road to Xen
Well what good is a stupid fast computer if all you do is poke around the terminal. So I decided to dump playing with VMware and give Xen a try. The lure of near hardware speeds for VM’s seemed like a no-brainer. But Xen is a much more difficult beast to tame.
With VMware server, all I needed to do was an emerge vmware-server, set a few config values and create a VM. A cinch! With Xen the road is a bit more rocky. Now you must ignore the fact that I’m playing with the razor’s edge so to speak and using the Xen overlay to get me the 3.1 version (versus the current stable v3.02). It seems to me that an open-source package with commercial backing usually doesn’t contain any mind-blowing problems, so I figure the gains will far out way the losses. But throw in cutting edge hardware and the goal of keeping home-user OS settings in the mix and you’re now playing with fire.
For starters, I got my stable config nicely setup to step down the CPU from 2.2GHz to a nice 1.0GHz when sitting idle (which is like most of the time). Not only does it save on electric, but the core temps drop by almost 20 degrees. Nice! Next I got the latest and greatest nvidia-drivers and alsa-driver keeping the action coming. All great if you’re using the standard disto-spiced Linux kernel. But switch to the Xen patched one and none of these guys wants to play nicely with each other.
I decided that I can not live without the official nvidia-drivers versus Xorg’s nv driver as the latter eats way too much CPU when doing nothing; as much as 20% across both cores! So I used this post to patch up an older version of the nvidia-drivers. However, stepping the CPU frequency still gives errors and the alsa drivers seems to constantly crash. In addition to those exact issues, the whole system still seems to be a little unstable, with weird jerkiness and odd pauses here and there.
The beauty of it is all I have to do is reboot and choose my stable kernel and all is sane again. Ahh, the fun of Linux.
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