On Jun 14, 2011, at 15:57, Steven Timm wrote:

> 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?

You're right, this matters. In my case (where the update worked), we're using an out-of-the-box SL setup: SL5.5/x86_64 Dom0 running the el5xen kernel/hypervisor, and SL6.0 VMs are ks-installed with virt-install. I think that makes it pygrub.

>  I thought SL6 didn't
> support being a xen host anymore.

No it doesn't, but running it as a DomU under SL5 works fine (although there seems to be some deterministic clock drift we don't observe with SL5 Vms - on the same host, three SL6 VMs consistently lost 5 minutes in about 70 days).

- Stephan
> 
> 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

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany