Schrödinger’s Cat in a Virtual ‘Box’

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.

Fedora Logo

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:

• Bug 977987, about incorrect default backends being creatied if using libvirt
• Bug 978036, if you plan to use pyGrub

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 which, allow me to say, is pretty cool!

XenFu Panda

• on an Fedora 19 Dom0:
  • Boot Fedora 19 LiveCD as  an x86_64 (PVon)HVM guest, using virt-manager and the libvirt libxl driver;
  • Install Fedora 19 via netinst as an x86_64 (PVon)HVM guest, using virt-manager and the libvirt libxl driver;
  • Install Fedora 19 via http install as a PV-guest using virt-manager and the libvirt libxl driver;

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.

Related articles

• Fedora 19 Final Is Out and Goes After Windows and Mac OS (news.softpedia.com)
• Fedora 19 Schrodinger’s Cat released with 3D printing, Developer’s Assistant, paradoxes (engadget.com)
• Archive:Tools/Xen (fedoraproject.org)