mathieu rohon wrote:
Hi all,
I'd like to use xen with fedora as host, and several OSes as guest (in fact 2). The aim is to use the host as a router for the guests. So i'd like to make the host as thin as possible, in order to provide most power to the guest. Do you know a smart way to do so?
I'd also like to hide the host from the user. When the user log in the host, a script is launched, and the appropriated guest start in full screen. Does anyone has already done something similar?
Will the guests be running all the time or do you wish to launch a new guest for each login?
The simplest case is probably going to be when you have the guests running all the time. In that case, edit /etc/inittab to disable normal mingetty, and replace with a script which runs a vncviewer and connects to the guest. (Mind you, launching the vncviewer under X is going to be a little more complex ...) Also have a start-up script under /etc/init.d which launches the guests, or make use of the /etc/init.d/xendomains script which does the same thing.
Beware that while you want a "thin" dom0, you want to avoid making it too small, because in Xen at least the dom0 runs processes on behalf of the guests. Not least if you have file-backed guests then there is a process called either qemu-dm or tapdisk which takes a significant amount of CPU and RAM. (Guests which have their disks mapped directly to LVs or partitions seem to be much more efficient in this respect).
Rich.