Trying Xen 4.0 on Debian 6.0 aka Squeeze

I have a rather mixed history with all these Virtualization techniques… I started with ranting about Xen and Ubuntu here on the blog, migrated to KVM and Ubuntu and am now considering moving back to Xen… on Debian.

Recently I needed to install Xen on one of our Machines in our Lab at work. KVM was not an option, because the System (a dual-xeon with HT) didn’t have hardware virtualization support. When I last used it, Xen 3 was a pain in the ass with it’s patched old Kernel and full-virtualized guests didn’t perform well. But Xen 4 now has support in upstream Kernel so I thought I’d give it a try… Installation went fine using aptitude. Everything got set up right. But there seems to be a bug with VGA Output though. I haven’t got a login promt or any init-script output until I removed ‘quiet’ from the Kernel’s bootloader options. But this seems to be Hypervisor related, as it does work with the Xen Kernel, but w/o Hypervisor beyond it. So, if all you get is something like

1
ERROR: Unable to locate IOAPIC for GSI 9

try removing quiet from your bootloader configuration…