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I'm trying to run Gentoo paravirtualized under XenServer 5.6.

Now, Gentoo is perfectly capable of booting without initrd, so my question is:

Do I need an initrd for pygrub to work?

Earlier attempts without initrd had resulted in errors, which might either be caused by mistakes in .config or the inexistence of initrd. I'm trying to figure out exactly what happened.

pepoluan
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1 Answers1

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After a lot of experimentation, I finally found the answer:

Yes, pygrub needs an initrd/initramfs.

So, I do it this way:

  • Build the kernel the manual way make menuconfig && make && make modules_install

  • Copy the resulting bzImage to /boot

  • Create the initrd using genkernel --oldconfig ramdisk

  • Feed the path to the kernel and the initrd to pygrub from XenServer's console

pepoluan
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