Xen 3.2.0

So Xen 3.2.0 was released last week.

Oddly enough there are no precompiled 64-bit binaries anymore. That does not make much sense to me – running Xen on 32 bit is just… painful. Problems with accessing ram beyond 4GB, issues with libc6, etc. On 64 bit all that stuff just works.

Sadly, the 3.2 release is broken. It simply does not build – make world dies with this mercurial error:

select-repository: Searching `.:..' for linux-2.6.18-xen.hg
select-repository: Ignoring `.'
not found!
select-repository: Unable to determine Xen repository parent.

Google returns some hits suggesting that this is caused by using a version of mercurial that is too old, but that is nonsense – I’m seeing this even with 0.9.5. It’s a bug in the Xen 3.2.X release.

The fix is easy; just check out the linux-2.6.18-xen mercurial repository yourself in the parent directory to where you have downloaded Xen:

  apt-get install gawk libssl-dev libncurses5-dev pciutils-dev
  cd /usr/src/
  hg clone http://xenbits.xensource.com/linux-2.6.18-xen.hg
  cd xen-3.2.X
  make world
  make install

Of course you can use make -jX to compile things faster. Time to give 3.2 a spin now