A simple matter of…

Well I’ve had enough of Xen - I’ve recently moved a disk from hdd to hdc and since I referred to it in a xen domain, when I tried to start that domain, it hung for several minutes (other domains also seemed to stop responding for a while) and then failed with:

abridgett@ripley:/var/log/xen$ Error: Device 2081 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working.

I checked the config and spotted the problem, but there is no excuse why this is not reported better by Xen. Even in the multitude of Xen logs, only one mentioned it - and that itself shows bad checking!

+ logger -p daemon.debug -- /etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge: 'Writing backend/vif/7/
0/hotplug-status' 'connected to xenstore.'
+ xenstore-write backend/vif/7/0/hotplug-status connected
stat: cannot stat `/dev/hdd6': No such file or directory

This by itself wouldn’t be enough to drop Xen, but the fact that it’s stuck on 2.6.18 (for Dom0) means that I’m having to backport more and more fixes and I’ve finally had enough. The only reason it’s not been replaced yet is that my hardware doesn’t support KVM (no hardware support on the CPU) but the hardware seems to be becoming unreliable (although it might be bad error recovery on such an old kernel) so I think it is probably time to upgrade anyhow.