North Star Labs

I’ve recently been struggling to track down a problem with my OpenSolaris xVM system. I’m running xvm in OpenSolaris b133. The issue is that my manual configuration of dom0_mem in /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst seems to constantly be overwritten upon reboot. This is a problem since I need dom0 to be clamped down to prevent Xen’s balloon feature from fighting with the ZFS arc. In addition to this problem, there are bugs in the b132 and b133 of OpenSolaris which require the config/dom0-min-mem SMF property to be set to match dom0_mem.

I’ve also been running into the dom0-min-mem issues documented at My South – Sun xVM 3.4.2 available, dom0_min_mem. Pascal also mentions setting the dom0-min-mem propery, but doesn’t appear to be running into the issue I have with b132 and b133 where the property is consistently changes by the xvm-milestone service method script.

The problem is caused by the SMF xvm milestone ( svc:/milestone/xvm) constantly re-writing these properties and the menu.lst file. The solution is to disable the xvm milestone and re-enable all of the xvm services manually. This will allow you to make manual changes to the menu.lst file without the xvm milestone interfering with you.

OpenSolaris introduced the xvm milestone in b126 around October of 2009. Please see [xen-discuss] FYI: enable/disable the xVM hypervisor.

Here is the recipe to fix the problem. First, make a backup copy of your menu.lst file, then disable the xvm milestone, enable the other xvm SMF services, and finally restore your menu.lst file. We do this because disabling the xvm milestone disables all of xvm, where we really just want to prevent /lib/svc/method/xvm-milestone from executing.

This assumes you already have xVM enabled through the use of svcadn enable milestone/xvm.

cd /rpool/boot/grub
pfexec cp -p menu.lst menu.lst.milestone-xvm.enabled
pfexec svcadm disable milestone/xvm
pfexec svcadm enable -r svc:/system/xvm/domains:default
pfexec cp -p menu.lst menu.lst.milestone-xvm.disabled
pfexec cp -p menu.lst.milestone-xvm.enabled menu.lst


Before rebooting, ensure the dom0_mem setting is something reasonable. I find 1.5GB to be a good balance.

title os-133-xvm1
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/os-133-xvm1
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz console=vga dom0_mem=1536M dom0_vcpus_pin=false watchdog=false
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive


Finally, ensure SMF properties match the dom0_mem value:

svccfg -s svc:/milestone/xvm listprop hypervisor/dom0_mem
svccfg -s xend listprop config/dom0-min-mem


If they don’t match, they may be set using:

pfexec svccfg -s svc:/system/xvm/xend setprop config/dom0-min-mem = 1536
pfexec /usr/sbin/svccfg -s svc:/milestone/xvm setprop hypervisor/dom0_mem = 1536


I plan to diagnose just why the xvm-milestone service method script is misbehaving so much and file the appropriate bug reports. If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, please let me know.

I cooked dinner for myself today and sat down at the table looking forward to streaming The Daily Show or The Colbert Report on Hulu since there’s no way I’m paying $65 a month for cable TV. As it turns out, there haven’t been any new episodes in awhile, and I like my fake news fresh off the wire, so I decided to catch up on my other fake news addiction; aggregated blog rss feeds.

I came across the TED talk for today, which is Michell Obama. Great speech by the way, check it out at: http://www.ted.com/talks/michelle_obama.html. The streaming video quality left something to be desired, so I looked around and found the HD podcast URL at podcasters.tv.

This works well with iTunes, and MediaLink is able to copy the movie file from my MacBook pro, but for some reason streaming the video usually quits part way through playback with an obscure error code.

I have my OpenSolaris, Intel Atom based file server running on a gigabit network connected up to the Playstation 3 and HDTV using MediaLink, so I decided to look for some unix tool to download the podcast which could easily be run from cron.

After some searching and research into different options, I downloaded Peapod, a wonderful python command line application, and gave it a whirl.

To my complete satisfaction, peapod runs from my home directory without requiring any piece of itself being installed into the system. The only missing dependency I ran into was urlgrabber for python 2.4. Luckily, I have easy_install installed so it was a simple matter of:
pfexec /usr/bin/easy_install-2.4 urlgrabber
Once urlgrabber was installed, setup of the podcast client was a breeze:

jmccune@rain:~$ cd ~/bin
jmccune@rain:~/bin/$ ln -s ../apps/peapod/peapod.py peapod
jmccune@rain:~/bin/$ cd ~
jmccune@rain:~$ peapod
Creating user directory: /home/jmccune/.peapod
Created a default configuration file in :
/home/jmccune/.peapod/peapod.xml
Please edit this file to contain your feeds and options.

I commented out the sample podcast and added TED in HD.
(Note: I found the feed URL by doing a “Get Info”, or clicking on the little i next to the podcast title in the podcast section of iTunes.)

For the title I made it “TED Talks (HD)” and for the URL, I used http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD.

Finally, running peapod simply works.

jmccune@rain:~$ peapod
...Spawning thread 0 for feed url http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD
Fetching feed for TED Talks (HD)
Downloading TED Talks (HD) -- http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Trackname MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Savename /export/dozer/podcasts/jmccune/TED Talks (HD)/MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Mime-type video/mp4


This will be added to cron to run every day a few hours before I get home from work, and MediaTomb should pickup the new content.

And now to figure out how to manually kick off a MediaTomb scan of the folder once downloading is complete.

Here are some decent feeds I’ve found so far:

peapod --addnew=http://www.hbo.com/podcasts/billmaher/podcast.xml --title="Bill Maher"


Please post more video feed URL’s, especially 720p and higher, in the comments if you have some good video podcasts worth watching on my TV.

Using OpenSolaris 2008.11, it appears the most complete way to obtain a full-featured development tool chain is to install the ss-dev and gcc-dev package clusters.

pfexec pkg install gcc-dev ss-dev

References:

• Sun Studio Express 11/08 Packages