Arch Linux User Repository

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

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!

@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.

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.

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

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.

stubdom hasn't built since May, so I'm update AUR to uninclude it. Still working the problem. This represents xen-minimal in my personal PKGBUILD repo, keep an eye out for an updated Xen.

python-setuptools is missing from the depencies.

otherwise built without problems in a clean arch chroot

As of now (2024-22-05) Xen with stubdom doesn't build because of a problem in the imported code. Been this way for about two weeks. Anyone else seeing this behavior?

Also, there is a lot of work happening on Xen in my development repo, thanks to @Serus. Check it out at: https://github.com/refutationalist/saur

FYI I plan on moving parts of xen to [extra] soon. Not all functionality of this AUR package will be retained, and you will likely have to e.g. have stubdom parts as their own AUR package xen-stubdom or similar

@Refutationalist

We need to change the file 'add-stubdom-fuxes.patch' to contain a new line, so it looks like this:

diff -Naur orig.xen-4.16.1/stubdom/Makefile xen-4.16.1/stubdom/Makefile
--- orig.xen-4.16.1/stubdom/Makefile    2022-05-16 09:41:38.409898784 -0700
+++ xen-4.16.1/stubdom/Makefile 2022-05-16 09:43:31.891076356 -0700
@@ -241,6 +241,7 @@
    patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm_extern.patch
    patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-microsecond-duration.patch
    patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-command-duration.patch
+   patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-gcc12-fixes.patch
    patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-tpm_bn_t-addr.patch
    mkdir $@/build
    cd $@/build; CC=${CC} $(CMAKE) .. -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING="-std=c99 -DTPM_NO_EXTERN $(TARGET_CPPFLAGS) $(TARGET_CFLAGS) -Wno-declaration-after-statement"
    touch $@

Add line patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-tpm_bn_t-addr.patch right after + patch -d $@ -p1 < vtpm-gcc12-fixes.patch to match the contents of src/xen/stubdom/Makefile (the target file for the patch).