I've installed a new Fedora box as a Xen host (Dom0), which turns out a little harder than expected.
First stop – install Xen via DNF and reboot. Find that the Xen boot option failed (a lot of errors regarding multiple boot). After some research on Google, I learn that it is because the multi-boot has been removed for security reasons.[1]
Ok – well it's annoying. Looks like I have two options [2]:
- Reconfigure GRUB manually to use the old behavior of the string loader
- Bypass GRUB and use Xen as an EFI boot loader
I'm leaving for option 2 because it seems to be a cleaner solution and does not require manipulating the shell script layers that have been built around GRUB these days to make it do what I want.
I arrived at creating an EFI boot option for Xen, but it seems like this option is ignored at startup. No error, no useful output. I do not know what to check next.
What I have up to here:
The EFI partition has EFI / xen with:
- xen.efi (copy of EFI / fedora / xen-4.11.1.efi)
- Copies of initramfs & vmlinuz from / boot
- xen.cfg
xen.cfg text:
[global]
default = fedora
[fedora]
options =
kernel = vmlinuz root = / dev / nvme0n1p1 rhgb LANG = en_GB.UTF-8
ramdisk = initramfs.img
EFI option created with the help of:
efibootmgr -c -L Xen -d / dev / sdc -p 1 -l \ EFI \ xen \ xen.efi -c
The target state here is: The machine starts with Xen and a Fedora Dom0. What should I check or what should I try next?
[1] https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2015-5281
[2] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_EFI