http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=860

Summary: device_mapper config variable is not checked for correctness Product: Xen Version: unstable Platform: Other OS/Version: Linux Status: NEW Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: Tools AssignedTo: xen-...@lists.xensource.com ReportedBy: henn...@gmx.de

While an error is given when the device_mapper variable is not set at all, there seems to be no check if the contents of this variable are usable and useful.

So, when setting it wrong, Xen just starts, not starting any graphics access, and not giving any useful information on solving the problem. That is bad and can cost users hours of their time.

I just searched for hours to find out this problem - when starting a HVM Domain with the new xensource 3.0.4 binaries, I got no graphics, neither in sdl nor in vnc. No error messages anywhere. Finally, just before writing a rant mail to -devel about new, undocumented changes, I just came up with the idea to try another setting for the device_mapper variable. And, exactly: while in Debian(where I ran the same domains before with the native packages), the qemu-dm is in the search path, and so this variable can be set with no abolute path, this is different in the xensource packages.

I'll look in the source and will try to find a place to put a check for this, and might come up with a patch some time...