Linux – How to install xen hypervisor + linux onto a usb memory stick

linuxxen

I'm wanting to create a bootable Linux + Xen Hypervisor on a USB stick.

I have it working how I want on a hard drive but for cloud deployment I'd like it to boot xen to a ram disk and mount the internal hard drive to /xen

The idea being that I can deploy new xen servers by just plugging in a USB stick.

How would I go about getting linux and xen onto a USB stick? I'm looking for some good tutorials but haven't found that many that suit. Apart from ones that convert ISO boot CD images to USB.

Note: I am not interested in answers that show me how to put xenserver on a usb stick. Xenserver is not linux + xen hypervisor.

Best Answer

Perhaps the Apline Linux Live XEN iso is what you are looking for

Alpine Linux Downloads

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Linux – Boot Debian Linux from image on external USB drive

Regarding the bootmanager: when using FAT as filesystem then syslinux would be one approach. Especially when booting from USB you might consider using grub for booting, as you'll be flexible with the grub shell (providing a nice tab-completion). To install grub you'd be running something like:

mount /dev/sdX /mnt/
grub-install --recheck --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdX

and adjust /boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly.

Your bootloader has to load kernel and initrd. So those files have to be outside your debianroot.img (unless you're using the ISO approach and grub2 with its loopback option, see http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2009/05/25/boot-an-iso-via-grub2/) and need to be referenced/configured in your bootloader (being syslinux.cfg for syslinux, menu.lst for grub1 and grub.cfg for grub2). The following is an example menu.lst file used for the grml live system (http://grml.org/) generated by grml2usb (http://grml.org/grml2usb/):

# misc options:
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
foreground  = 000000
background  = FFCC33

title grml  - Default boot (using 1024x768 framebuffer)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/release/grml/linux26 apm=power-off vga=791 quiet boot=live nomce live-media-path=/live/grml/ 
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/release/grml/initrd.gz

The initrd file has to locate the debianroot.img on your devices and loopback mount it then. Then it should change your root file system via e.g. pivot_root (see http://linux.die.net/man/8/pivot_root) to inside the mounted loopback file. You can find more details regarding the initrd process in Documentation/initrd.txt of the linux kernel sources: http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/initrd.txt

If you'd like to know how common live systems do this kind of stuff check out debian-live (http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/) or grml-live (http://grml.org/grml-live/) in combination with live-initramfs (which does all the initrd/initramfs magic and is used in most Debian based live systems; http://packages.debian.org/sid/live-initramfs).

A different approach to your debianroot.img approach would be talking an existing Debian based Linux Live system providing so called "root persistency" (for example the official Debian-live project provides this as well as grml 2009.05 does).

Linux – Accidentally formated external usb harddrive (500GB) with bootable iso (1GB), how can I recover the data

you can use this tool http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Best Answer

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Linux – Accidentally formated external usb harddrive (500GB) with bootable iso (1GB), how can I recover the data

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