Re: Installing XenServer 5.0.0. to Intel DQ35MPE board
Posted: Jan 25, 2009 11:18 AM   in response to: Erick Perez in response to: Erick Perez 	  	
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I am very glad to inform that the issue I had with my motherboard and XenServer 5.0 has been solved.
To recap:

Motherboard: Intel DQ35MPE (revision B)
CPU: Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz
8GB RAM
SATA disk (AHCI mode)
ICH9 chipset
board does not have kbd/mouse ports, only USB ports.
board does not have serial ports.

Issue: While trying to install XenServer, machine froze at:
ACPI: PCI root bridge (PCI0) (0000:00)

Fix:
1- Boot again with the XenServer CD, press a few times the SHIFT key to land into the boot prompt.
2- type menu.c32 you will get the menu options where you can modify the boot options
3- Edit the entry for no-serial boot options. This option boots XenServer installation without serial support. Modify entry to look like this:
/boot/xen.gz acpi=off dom0_mem
Just insert acpi=off after xen.gz and before dom0_mem.
4- Press Enter to boot, XenServer will continue to boot and you will be able to finish the install.

Caveats:
Disabling ACPI on this (and probably others) motherboard will not allow XenServer to detect additional cores on the CPU.

Permanent Fix:
1- After installing XenServer, you will probably have to reboot again. remove install cd.
2- While rebooting press shift several times to get to the boot prompt.
3- type menu.c32 on the boot prompt and press enter
4- The default entry for boot is xe, edit this one by pressing TAB key.
5- you have one option to modify
/boot/xen.gz dom0_mem
Just insert acpi=off after xen.gz and before dom0_mem. Remember that with this, you will disable multicore.
6- press enter to boot normally.
7- Now that you have Xen up and running, log in with user root and your password.
8- edit /boot/extlinux.conf
9- My entry looks like this before editing:
label xe
+ # XenServer+
kernel mboot.c32
append /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=752M lowmem_emergency_pool=16M crashkernel=64M@32M console=/dev/null vga=mode-0x0311 ---
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen root=LABEL=root-owpfsofb ro quiet vga=785 splash --- /boot/initrd-2.6-xen.img

Method 1: Disabling ACPI
# XenServer
kernel mboot.c32
append /boot/xen.gz acpi=off dom0_mem=752M lowmem_emergency_pool=16M crashkernel=64M@32M console=/dev/null vga=mode-0x0311 ---
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen root=LABEL=root-owpfsofb ro quiet vga=785 splash --- /boot/initrd-2.6-xen.img

Method 2: Disabling MMCONFIG
# XenServer
kernel mboot.c32
append /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=752M lowmem_emergency_pool=16M crashkernel=64M@32M console=/dev/null vga=mode-0x0311 ---
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen pci=nommconf root=LABEL=root-owpfsofb ro quiet vga=785 splash --- /boot/initrd-2.6-xen.img

Note: Method 2 is a known workaround on Intel motherboards, however it took me a while to figure where to put the parameter. If I append the pci parameters after xen.gz and before dom0, it wont work. If I append the pci parameter anywhere else but as shown in method2, it wont work.
My delay in getting the answer was to figure it out where the parameter had to go. Plenty of Google results showed as an answer the pci=nommconf parameter, but never showed where exactly to put it.

It hope with this post someone with the same problem will fix it in seconds instead of days. however it was a nice learning experience.
Now I have 8 Intel boards happily running XenServer.

Thanks,

Edited by: Erick Perez on Jan 25, 2009 11:23 AM