Arch Linux User Repository

Thank you for your work, FFY00.

I'm currently out in the woods with limited internet. I'll be back sometime next week, at which point I'll clean up outstanding changes in my repo and push it to AUR. I didn't care about the docs package, but I can re-add that.

I'll also talk to the QEMU maintainers about adding the configure arg for Xen to QEMU, and seeing what they're doing upstream about GCC and python changes. I'll also likely push my PVH kernel to AUR.

@JohnTh:

The minimal-components builds were never useful to me without modification, which is another reason why my personal repo is the way it is. But my build wasn't going to be on AUR, so I suppose I should revisit that. I invariably need stubdom, so I pulled out the optional check. Other stuff I can probably get rid of, qemut in particular.

I'm not familiar with what the community decisions were. I can review the comments, but that wasn't my initial aim and I took over the package as I seemed to have inadvertently caused a problem. Would it make more sense if you or someone else took over the package? I'm open to that.

Otherwise, I'm going to look into fixing what I have outstanding and updating the package sometime next week.

@JohnTh qemu requires the Xen headers to compile Xen support, so unless you can get this into an arch repository, it will be unlikely our qemu maintainers will want to build the Xen tools themselves.

I would prefer such headers/compilation to be a separate package, so to keep this one lean. Much like the kernel headers are available in an addition package.

It is much easier to support a minimal-components build:

Do we need?: - qemut (--disable-qemu-traditional) https://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=blob;f=configure;hb=staging - stubdom (--disable-stubdom) https://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=blob;f=configure;hb=staging - ipxe (only used with qemut rombios / with-system-ipxe exists, but only aur ipxe package) https://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=blob;f=tools/firmware/Makefile;h=809a5fd0255e19b15abda6daf891ed1f5e63e9ad;hb=staging

qemu requires the Xen headers to compile Xen support, so unless you can get this into an arch repository, it will be unlikely our qemu maintainers will want to build the Xen tools themselves.

Most of these have been covered deeper in these comments: https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/xen/?O=0&PP=100

My minimal Xen staging tee build seems to be compiling fine without any extra patches, but it is way too messy to use: https://gitlab.com/archlinux-packages-johnth/xen/-/blob/xen-git/PKGBUILD

Thanks FFY00 and Ref.

Thank you for your work, FFY00.

I'm currently out in the woods with limited internet. I'll be back sometime next week, at which point I'll clean up outstanding changes in my repo and push it to AUR. I didn't care about the docs package, but I can re-add that.

I'll also talk to the QEMU maintainers about adding the configure arg for Xen to QEMU, and seeing what they're doing upstream about GCC and python changes. I'll also likely push my PVH kernel to AUR.

@FFY00: The package I'm working on is very much based on your work and is intended as an interim solution while you are doing things properly. I tried to make that clear in my notes. If I have given any other impression, it is not intended and I apologize.

I had a personal itch to scratch and I shared my work. I wasn't figuring on much of anything beyond that, so the formatting changes didn't really matter to me very much. You're welcome to use what I've done or dismiss it entirely.

There were several things that blocked me from updating the package, you should be able to find the discussion below. If you think you are able to do it package the new version properly, please show me a PKGBUILD and I'll disown.

@Refutationalist Unfortunately, it's difficult to diff your changes against this PKGBUILD because of all the formatting changes. Do you plan on rebasing your changes on top of this pkg, or do you consider your work to be a hard fork at this point?

Here is the minimal diff I came up with on top of this PKGBUILD to get 4.13.1 building with latest GCC (& drop the python2 dep): https://github.com/sl4mmy/docker-aur-xen/blob/master/aur-xen_PKGBUILD.patch. The two patches for GCC 10 compile fixes can be found here: https://github.com/sl4mmy/docker-aur-xen/blob/master/gcc-10-fixes.patch, and here: https://github.com/sl4mmy/docker-aur-xen/blob/master/gcc-10-ipxe-fixes.patch.

It would be great if we could get this pkg updated to 4.13.1, including all of your additional improvements (stubdom, rundir, firmware hooks, etc.).

@ntegan: that's good to hear. I'll probably want to look at changing the GRUB scripts then to look for xen.gz instead of a versioned file.

My justification is that I use either syslinux or direct EFI boot, and having to change my settings on every revision is suboptimal. Also, since other kernels aren't versioned in the repos, it seemed a bit more Arch-like to me.

In the meantime, since I first posted I've made a couple of bugfixes. I moved ipxe out of _stubdom_sources as it's not for stubdom, set rundir, and then added a hook to extract firmware from intel-ucode so xen EFI can use it. I'm working on an AMD hook.

Thanks for the updated PKGBUILD, @Refutationalist.

Only thing I had to change for GRUB to generate the menu entry was to move my /boot/xen.gz to /boot/xen-4.13.1.gz, to match what the grub menu entry generator was looking for.

I found that the gcc upgrade to 10 broke my compile, too. The only reason I needed to compile is that nettle upgraded and requires xen to be recompiled, but I could only get xen 4.13.0 to compile, not 4.13.1. I downgraded gcc back to the last version of 9 and was able to recompile for the newer version of nettle.

I'm still on kernel 5.5.13-arch2 as it was the latest I could get HVM networking to work (I run OPNSense as a HVM).

My server motherboard doesn't have UEFI, so I'm only doing BIOS boot with Grub2.

Thanks for the repo. I will certainly check it out!