Chapter 29. Configuring the Xen kernel boot parameters
The GNU Grand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB) is a program for booting various installed operating systems or kernels. GRUB also allows the user to pass arguments to the kernel. The GRUB configuration file (located in
/boot/grub/grub.conf
) creates the list of operating systems the GRUB boot menu interface. When you install the kernel-xen
RPM, a script adds the kernel-xen
entry to the GRUB configuration file which boots kernel-xen
by default. Edit the grub.conf
file to modify the default kernel or to add additional kernel parameters.
If you set your Linux grub entries to reflect this example, the boot loader loads the hypervisor,
initrd
image, and Linux kernel. Since the kernel entry is on top of the other entries, the kernel loads into memory first. The boot loader sends, and receives, command line arguments to and from the hypervisor and Linux kernel. This example entry shows how you would restrict the Dom0 linux kernel memory to 800 MB.
You can use these GRUB parameters to configure the Virtualization hypervisor:
mem
mem
This limits the amount of memory that is available to the hypervisor kernel.
com1=115200, 8n1
com1=115200, 8n1
This enables the first serial port in the system to act as serial console (com2 is assigned for the next port, and so on).
dom0_mem
dom0_mem
This limits the memory available for the hypervisor.
dom0_max_vcpus
dom0_max_vcpus
This limits the amount of CPUs visible to the Xen domain0.
acpi
acpi
This switches the ACPI hypervisor to the hypervisor and domain0. The ACPI parameter options include:
noacpi
noacpi
This disables ACPI for interrupt delivery.