Raisin

From Xen

Build, deployment and test tool for the Xen Project hypervisor.

Overview

The purpose of Raisin is to retrieve and build from source everything needed for a good Xen installation. Today that includes Xen, QEMU, Grub, SeaBios, OVMF and Libvirt. It can be used to quickly setup a Xen development environment. Optionally it can also install and configure the system for you.

Raisin is meant to be easy to read so that it can be used as a guideline on how to build and configure the system.

Quick Start

1. Select a Linux Distribution

Raisin has been tested on Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Fedora 21 and CentOS 6 & 7. It is likely that it will work with other distros, but we have not tested it at this stage. If you tried it, and it works, please add the distro to the list above.

2. Install Selected OS

We require a specific minimal functionality from your base Linux distribution to make it as easy as possible. We recommend using a minimal install of your chosen distro to get started. You may need to get git and a few other tools using the distros application managers, if the software does not come with the distro by default. All other dependencies are automatically retrieved or pulled from the relevant git repositories and then built.

3. Download Raisin

 git clone git://xenbits.xenproject.org/raisin.git

The Raisin repo contains a script that installs builds Xen with all dependencies, configuration files and some tests.

4. Configure

 cp defconfig config

We recommend that you review the configuration file called raisin/defconfig, copy it to config, then make changes as necessary. Note that the configuration contains sensible defaults and will work.

5. Start the build and install

 cd raisin
 raise -y build

It takes a few minutes, we recommend reading the README file while it is building. Note that you will be asked for the sudo password to install dependencies. If you install them beforehand, manually or executing raise install-builddep, no sudo password will be necessary.

Resources