Package Details: xen 4.21.2pre-1

Git Clone URL: https://aur.archlinux.org/xen.git (read-only, click to copy)
Package Base: xen
Description: Open-source type-1 or baremetal hypervisor
Upstream URL: https://xenproject.org/
Keywords: hypervisor virtualization xen
Licenses: GPL2
Submitter: sergej
Maintainer: Refutationalist
Last Packager: Refutationalist
Votes: 183
Popularity: 0.61
First Submitted: 2009-11-09 11:22 (UTC)
Last Updated: 2026-05-06 02:59 (UTC)

Latest Comments

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ArthurBorsboom commented on 2026-07-29 18:35 (UTC)

Booting by systemd-bootd or directly by the motherboards UEFI firmware has the same effect. I am not looking forward fiddling with bootloaders and workarounds, so I will join your discussion on xen-users to get it fixed at the source.

Refutationalist commented on 2026-07-28 22:54 (UTC)

The problem seems to be the EFI kernel on some Ryzen motherboards. It never actually gets to Xen, EFI seems to access memory outside of where it should and it silently dies. I was fortunate enough to have a motherboard that spit debug information out the serial port.

If you could post your issue to xen-users so the devs know this is a wider issue than just me, that'd be helpful. There's some recognition that EFI support has some weaknesses, it seems.

The short term work around is to use the multiboot2 kernel. I have a patch to GRUB2 I'm working so that bootloader will do. But it currently has a problem with multiple kernels. See this bug report: https://github.com/refutationalist/saur/issues/43

Personally, I'd rather use Limine, but it had an issue. I filed a bug report and they've got a potential fix in place, but I don't really have a chance to check on it until later next month. You can see that here: https://github.com/Limine-Bootloader/Limine/issues/591

ArthurBorsboom commented on 2026-07-26 23:08 (UTC)

The package 4.21.2pre-1 does not work on my system. It results in a black screen and it seems to be stuck.

You have mentioned issues on a Ryzen server. I believe mine is similar.

AMD EPYC 4344P 8-Core Processor

I have adjusted the PKGBUILD to build 4.20.0 to have my system working again. These are the changes that resulted in a bootable and working Xen system again.

-pkgver=4.21.2pre +pkgver=4.20.0

-options=(!buildflags) +options=(!strip !buildflags)

I am uncertain about the !strip option if it was actually necessary.

Would you mind considering rolling back to a working version, i.e. 4.20.0?

Refutationalist commented on 2026-06-03 03:04 (UTC)

Hey all, I've been running into some problems getting EFI boot to work on some modern Ryzen servers. I'm still working the problem, but if anyone else has experienced this I'd love to hear about it.

My description of the problem is available here: https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-users/2026-06/msg00000.html

Refutationalist commented on 2026-02-27 07:07 (UTC)

Realized I hadn't pushed a new package for xen from my personal repo to AUR in a bit. No major changes since my last post.

vibrion commented on 2025-03-25 14:12 (UTC) (edited on 2025-03-31 18:31 (UTC) by vibrion)

Thanks for your quick response Refutationalist. I've managed to compile on two servers xen 4.20.0-2 on one it runs flawlessly but in the other (an old huawei 1288v3 server) efi loader can't find xen.efi, so no boot. After some research, I was able to boot xen only entering in EFI shell (from arch install), selecting boot partition and calling efi.xen from there a couple of times. I'm thinking this could be related to server bios UEFI implementation. Comparing this xen.efi with previous version noticed an increase in image size. As always thanks!

EDIT: after UEFI fails with xen.efi not found, entering in EFI shell produce same results if try to load xen.efi, but if I try to load xen.gz (xen for grub) says unsupported, but loading xen.efi again it boots fine!

Refutationalist commented on 2025-03-13 06:19 (UTC)

@vibrion If you compile the package as is you'll get a version of Xen from the current stable tree (right now, 4.20.0) without the stubdom support files. This hasn't changed for several versions of the package. I do suggest building Xen in a chroot or clean VM as the build process can bring in surprise dependencies.

As far as booting domUs, I've added the new PV and PVH grub packages to AUR. Feel free to build them. PyGrub has been deprecated for years and has problems.

To use the new grub, use it in the kernel line in your domU configs. For PVH:

kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/pvhgrub"

For PV:

kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/pvgrub64"

This grub will look for a configuration file in the usual places.

One problem is that pvgrub (32 or 64) doesn't understand the way Arch Linux compresses the kernel. For it to properly work, we need to make a vmlinux using the extract_vmlinux script in the linux-headers package. If you don't feel like doing that, the PVH bootloader does not have that issue.

I plan on doing an update of the documentation in the wiki as soon as the most recent spate of changes is complete. I'm currently working on a problem with edk2 which prevents the UEFI firmware from seeing the right number of cores.

vibrion commented on 2025-03-12 22:33 (UTC)

Xen on Arch has gone through so many changes that I'm currently dizzy. Calling yay -S on Xen will compile which version? Is there a possibility of a brief guide on how to use your repo (I need Grub support since Pygrub is deprecated). Thanks in advance for your work.

Refutationalist commented on 2025-03-12 12:06 (UTC) (edited on 2025-03-13 08:23 (UTC) by Refutationalist)

We've moved to the newly-stable 4.20.0 branch. There are also other changes:

  • stubdom is fixed by disabling the vtmp and vtpmmgr components. This gets rid of a few source files and our remaining patches.
  • Debug files are only removed if the debug option is not set in makepkg.cfg (or the PKGBUILD itself)
  • pygrub has been removed
  • optdepends are adjusted for the upcoming xen-grub split package for the various Xen flavored builds.

If you're still using pygrub note that it is deprecated. The solution is to build PV grub instead, which used to be in AUR but is now missing. I am asking a couple questions on the mailing list, and I intend to put my current build of xen-grub (which supersedes xen-pvhgrub) on AUR as soon as possible. If you need to build it before that occurs, you can find it in my PKGBUILD repo.

EDIT: 4.20.0-2 adds support for the xen-edk2 package, which has a fixed UEFI for xen

Refutationalist commented on 2024-12-06 01:37 (UTC)

Please Note: Per best-practices by upstream this package follows the git stable branch. Minor releases do not require a version bump and the PKGBUILD will provide the appropriate version number.

stubdom is still broken.

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