A para-virtualized (PVM) appliance is one that has been configured with a virtualization-aware OS kernel, and uses the Xen hypervisor APIs for access to all hardware (console, memory, disk, network).
A para-virtualized appliance must have its initial executable image in the form of a statically-linked ELF file, optionally compressed with gzip. The initial executable is usually the OS kernel. The appliance may also use one or more additional binaries loaded into memory at boot time (for example, an initial ramdisk).
The locations of the initial executable and any other optional binaries must be defined in a file stored on the appliance's boot volume, and named either /boot/grub/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst. The file format is that of the GRUB configuration file (for example, see man 8 grub). The files referred to in the grub configuration file are relative to the boot disk's file system and must be on the boot disk image itself. Note that the GRUB binary itself need not be present - it is not used to boot a para-virtualized appliance.
Booting para-virtualized appliances is limited to the same file system formats as the ones supported by GRUB (for example, ext2/3, fat, ufs, reiserfs, minix, xfs, jfs).
|
Copyright © 2012 CA.
All rights reserved.
|
|