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Schrödinger's Cat in a (Xen) Virtualzed 'Box'

Dario Faggioli

Dario Faggioli

— 2 min read
Fedora Logo

Fedora Logo

Yes, apparently Schrödinger’s cat is alive, as the latest release of Fedora – Fedora 19, codename Schrödinger’s cat– as been released on July 2nd, and that even happened quite on time.
So, apparently, putting the cat “in a box” and all the stuff was way too easy, and that’s why we are bringing the challenge to the next level: do you dare putting Schrödinger’s cat “in a virtual box”?
In other words, do you dare install Fedora 19 within a Xen virtual machine? And if yes, how about doing that using Fedora 19 itself as Dom0?

Well, as a matter of fact, you should, since it is all pretty easy and straightforward. In fact, both me and my fellow Xen (and, in his case, Linux too) developer, Konrad from Oracle, did some tests on that, right before the release. It turned out that Xen is in a pretty good shape inside Fedora, and all the issues we found have been fixed in a matter of hours by the package maintainer M. A. Young.
For more details on how to install and get on with Xen on Fedora, have a look at this Wiki page: Fedora Host Installation.
The issues I’m referring to are these two:

As they are both fixed already, all you have to make sure is you, right after installing Fedora and going through all the steps described in the wiki, do the following:

# yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing xen-4.2.2-10.fc19

That’s it. Having done that, here it is what I was able to do, on a Fedora 19 Dom0 (which, allow me to say, is pretty cool!):

XenFu

XenFu Panda

So yes, “the cat” is alive and kicking purring, both as a Xen host (with Xen 4.2 being what it ships by default) and as a Xen guest.

[Verbatim reblogged from Dario’s]

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