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20.2. Operating System Booting
There are a number of different ways to boot virtual machines each with their own pros and cons. Each one is described in the sub-sections that follow and include: BIOS boot loader, host physical machine boot loader, and direct kernel boot.
20.2.1. BIOS Boot loader
Booting through the BIOS is available for hypervisors supporting full virtualization. In this case the BIOS has a boot order priority (floppy, harddisk, cdrom, network) determining where to obtain/find the boot image. The OS section of the domain XML contains the information as follows:
...
<os>
<type>hvm</type>
<loader>/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader</loader>
<boot dev='hd'/>
<boot dev='cdrom'/>
<bootmenu enable='yes'/>
<smbios mode='sysinfo'/>
<bios useserial='yes' rebootTimeout='0'/>
</os>
...Figure 20.2. BIOS boot loader domain XML
The components of this section of the domain XML are as follows:
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
<type> | Specifies the type of operating system to be booted on the guest virtual machine. hvm indicates that the OS is one designed to run on bare metal, so requires full virtualization. linux refers to an OS that supports the Xen 3 hypervisor guest ABI. There are also two optional attributes, arch specifying the CPU architecture to virtualization, and machine referring to the machine type. Refer to Driver Capabilities for more information. |
<loader> | refers to a piece of firmware that is used to assist the domain creation process. It is only needed for using Xen fully virtualized domains. |
<boot> | takes one of the values:fd, hd, cdrom or network and is used to specify the next boot device to consider. The boot element can be repeated multiple times to setup a priority list of boot devices to try in turn. Multiple devices of the same type are sorted according to their targets while preserving the order of buses. After defining the domain, its XML configuration returned by libvirt (through virDomainGetXMLDesc) lists devices in the sorted order. Once sorted, the first device is marked as bootable. For more information see BIOS bootloader. |
<bootmenu> | determines whether or not to enable an interactive boot menu prompt on guest virtual machine startup. The enable attribute can be either yes or no. If not specified, the hypervisor default is used |
<smbios> | determines how SMBIOS information is made visible in the guest virtual machine. The mode attribute must be specified, as either emulate (lets the hypervisor generate all values), host(copies all of Block 0 and Block 1, except for the UUID, from the host physical machine's SMBIOS values; the virConnectGetSysinfo call can be used to see what values are copied), or sysinfo (uses the values in the sysinfo element). If not specified, the hypervisor default setting is used. |
<bios> | This element has attribute useserial with possible values yes or no. The attribute enables or disables Serial Graphics Adapter which allows users to see BIOS messages on a serial port. Therefore, one needs to have serial port defined. Note there is another attribute, rebootTimeout that controls whether and after how long the guest virtual machine should start booting again in case the boot fails (according to BIOS). The value is in milliseconds with maximum of 65535 and special value -1 disables the reboot. |
