How are you booting the xen domU's, with pygrub, pvgrub, or
with external kernel?
Smells like either the mkinitrd failed to run at all, or
ran in such a way that it didn't put some required xen block
device into the ramdisk.

For that matter--what hypervisor host are you using for the SL6 xen 
domU's--is it an SL6 guest on an SL5 hypervisor?  I thought SL6 didn't
support being a xen host anymore.

Steve Timm


On Tue, 14 Jun 2011, Stephan Wiesand wrote:

> Hi Steven,
>
> On Jun 14, 2011, at 0:04, Steven Haigh wrote:
>
>> In the latest batch of updates, I installed kernel-2.6.32-131.2.1.el6.x86_64 via a 'yum -y update'.
>>
>> It seemed all of my 5 Xen DomUs running SL6 failed to boot upon rebooting. It looks like all of these systems failed at roughly where switchroot is called.
>>
>> Interestingly, I could recover from this by shutting down the DomU, mounting then chrooting the DomUs filesystem and issuing:
>> 	# rpm -ivh --force kernel-2.6.32-131.2.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
>>
>> Not sure how widespread this issue is, but I had a 100% failure rate on Xen DomUs. The one bare metal system I updated did so with no errors.
>
> no problems here on the two Xen domUs we're currently running. But then, we're still updating kernels with "rpm -i" rather than yum.
>
> Just a data point.
>
> Regards,
> 	Stephan
>
>

-- 
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Steven C. Timm, Ph.D  (630) 840-8525
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Fermilab Computing Division, Scientific Computing Facilities,
Grid Facilities Department, FermiGrid Services Group, Group Leader.
Lead of FermiCloud project.