LDoms Community Cookbook

Contents

In this Section ...

Section Introduction

This section provides information and procedures on how to run various operating systems in guest domains. These may include unsupported and development environments and approaches.

Installing Linux as a Guest O/S

(Contributed by Alex Chartre)

Linux Installation Overview

The support for the sun4v architecture and LDoms virtual device drivers have been integrated into the Linux 2.6.23 kernel. However the installer of most Linux distributions does not include the LDoms virtual device drivers (sunvnet and sunvdc), so this prevents installing those Linux distributions.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty) on LDoms Procedure

• Download the Ubuntu 7.10 installation image for SPARC http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/installer-sparc/current/images/sparc64/netboot/2.6/boot.img

• Create a boot server for downloading the install image (this can done on the primary domain):
  • edit /etc/ethers with the ethernet address and hostname of the guest domain
  • edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and make sure that the line starting with "ethers:" contents "nis files" or "files"
  • start the rarp service:

    primary# svcadm enable rarp

  • create the /tftpboot directory

    primary# mkdir /tftpboot

  • edit /etc/inetd.conf and uncomment the line for the tftp service (last line)
  • activate the tftp service

    primary# inetconv

  • copy the downloaded boot.img file into the /tftpboot directory

    primary# cp boot.img /tftpboot/XXXXXXXX

• Create a guest domain with one virtual disk to which you will install linux (Note: other creation commands have been removed):

  primary# ldm add-vdsdev /ldg1/bootdisk vol0@primary-vds0
  primary# ldm add-vdisk vdisk0 vol0@primary-vds0 ldg1

• Bind and start the domain:

  primary# ldm bind ldg1*
  primary# ldm start ldg1*
  primary# telnet localhost <port number>

• Boot the domain over the network:

  ok boot vnet

The Ubuntu installer will be downloaded and you should be able to install Linux on the virtual disk. Remember the control domain must be configured to use the vswitch for traffic to ldg1.