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Chapter 29. Troubleshooting Para-virtualized Drivers

29.1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Virtualization log file and directories
29.2. Para-virtualized guest fail to load on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 guest operating system
29.3. A warning message is displayed while installing the para-virtualized drivers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
29.4. What to do if the guest operating system has been booted with virt-manager or virsh
29.5. Manually loading the para-virtualized drivers
29.6. Verifying the para-virtualized drivers have successfully loaded
29.7. The system has limited throughput with para-virtualized drivers
This chapter deals with issues you may encounter with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts and fully virtualized guests using the para-virtualized drivers

29.1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Virtualization log file and directories

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the log file written by the xend daemon and the qemu-dm process are all kept in the following directories:
/var/log/xen/
directory holding all log file generated by the xend daemon and qemu-dm process.
xend.log
  • This logfile is used by xend to log any events generate by either normal system events or operator initiated events.
  • virtual machine operations such as create, shutdown, destroy etc are all logged in this logfile.
  • Usually this logfile will be the first place to look at in the event of a problem. In many cases you will be able to identify the root cause by scanning the logfile and review the entries logged just prior to the actual error message.
xend-debug.log
  • used to record error events from xend and its subsystems (such as framebuffer and Python scripts etc..)
xen-hotplug.log
  • used to log events from hotplug events.
  • events such as devices not coming online or network bridges not online will be logged in this file
qemu-dm.PID.log
  • this file is create by the qemu-dm process which is started for each fully-virtualized guest.
  • the PID will be replaced with the PID of the process of the related qemu-dm process
  • You can retrieve the PID for a given qemu-dm process using the ps command and in looking at the process arguments you can identify the virtual machine the qemu-dm process belongs to.
If you are troubleshooting a problem with the virt-manager application you can also review the logfile generated by it. The logfile for virt-manager will be in a directory called .virt-manager in the user's home directory whom ran virt-manager. This directory will usually be ~/.virt-manager/virt-manager.

Note

The logfile is overwritten every time you start virt-manager. If you are troubleshooting a problem with virt-manager make sure you save the logfile before you restart virt-manager after an error has occurred.
There are a few other directories and files which may be of interest when troubleshooting a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Virtualization environment:
/var/lib/xen/images/
the standard directory for file based virtual machine images.
/var/lib/xen/xend-db/
directory that hold the xend database which is generated every time the daemon is restarted.
/etc/xen/
holds a number of configuration files used to tailor your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Virtualization environment to suite your local needs
  • xend-config.sxp is the main configuration for the xend daemon. It used to enable/disable specific functionality of the Xen daemon, and to configure the callouts to Xen networking.
/var/xen/dump/
hold dumps generate by virtual machines or when using the xm dump-core command.
/proc/xen/
has a number of entries which can be used to retrieve additional information:
  • /proc/xen/capabilities
  • /proc/xen/privcmd
  • /proc/xen/balloon
  • /proc/xen/xenbus
  • /proc/xen/xsd_port
  • /proc/xen/xsd_kva