Building Open vSwitch for XenServer
-----------------------------------
-The recommended build environment to build RPMs for Citrix XenServer
-is the DDK VM available from Citrix. If you are building from an Open
-vSwitch distribution tarball, this VM has all the tools that you will
-need. If you are building from an Open vSwitch Git tree, then you
-will need to first create a distribution tarball elsewhere, by running
-"./boot.sh; ./configure; make dist" in the Git tree, because the DDK
-VM does not include Autoconf or Automake that are required to
-bootstrap the Open vSwitch distribution.
-
-Once you have a distribution tarball, copy it into
-/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES inside the VM. Then execute the following:
+You may build from an Open vSwitch distribution tarball or from an
+Open vSwitch Git tree. The recommended build environment to build
+RPMs for Citrix XenServer is the DDK VM available from Citrix.
+
+1. If you are building from an Open vSwitch Git tree, then you will
+ need to first create a distribution tarball by running "./boot.sh;
+ ./configure; make dist" in the Git tree. You cannot run this in
+ the DDK VM, because it lacks tools that are necessary to bootstrap
+ the Open vSwitch distribution. Instead, you must run this on a
+ machine that has the tools listed in INSTALL.Linux as prerequisites
+ for building from a Git tree.
+
+2. Copy the distribution tarball into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES inside
+ the DDK VM.
+
+3. In the DDK VM, unpack the distribution tarball into a temporary
+ directory and "cd" into the root of the distribution tarball.
+
+4. To build Open vSwitch userspace, run:
+
+ rpmbuild -bb xenserver/openvswitch-xen.spec
+
+ This produces three RPMs in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386:
+ "openvswitch", "openvswitch-modules-xen", and
+ "openvswitch-debuginfo".
+
+Build Parameters
+----------------
+
+openvswitch-xen.spec needs to know a number of pieces of information
+about the XenServer kernel. Usually, it can figure these out for
+itself, but if it does not do it correctly then you can specify them
+yourself as parameters to the build. Thus, the final "rpmbuild" step
+above can be elaborated as:
VERSION=<Open vSwitch version>
- XENKERNEL=<Xen kernel version>
- cd /tmp
- tar xfz /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/openvswitch-$VERSION.tar.gz
+ KERNEL_NAME=<Xen Kernel name>
+ KERNEL_VERSION=<Xen Kernel version>
+ KERNEL_FLAVOR=<Xen Kernel flavor(suffix) >
rpmbuild \
-D "openvswitch_version $VERSION" \
- -D "xen_version $XENKERNEL" \
- -bb openvswitch-$VERSION/xenserver/openvswitch-xen.spec
+ -D "kernel_name $KERNEL_NAME" \
+ -D "kernel_version $KERNEL_VERSION" \
+ -D "kernel_flavor $KERNEL_FLAVOR" \
+ -bb xenserver/openvswitch-xen.spec
where:
<openvswitch version> is the version number that appears in the
name of the Open vSwitch tarball, e.g. 0.90.0.
- <Xen kernel version> is the version number of the Xen kernel,
- e.g. 2.6.32.12-0.7.1.xs5.6.100.307.170586xen. This version number
- appears as the name of a directory in /lib/modules inside the VM.
- It always ends in "xen".
+ <Xen Kernel name> is the name of the XenServer kernel package,
+ e.g. kernel-xen or kernel-NAME-xen, without the "kernel-" prefix.
+
+ <Xen Kernel version> is the output of:
+ rpm -q --queryformat "%{Version}-%{Release}" <kernel-devel-package>,
+ e.g. 2.6.32.12-0.7.1.xs5.6.100.323.170596, where <kernel-devel-package> is
+ the name of the -devel package corresponding to <Xen Kernel name>.
-Three RPMs will be output into /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386, whose names begin
-with "openvswitch", "openvswitch-modules-xen", and "openvswitch-debuginfo".
+ <Xen Kernel flavor (suffix) > is either "xen" or "kdump".
+ The "xen" flavor is the main running kernel flavor and the "kdump" flavor is
+ the crashdump kernel flavor. Commonly, one would specify "xen" here.
Installing Open vSwitch for XenServer
-------------------------------------
/etc/init.d/openvswitch runs early in boot. It does roughly the
following:
- * Loads the OVS kernel module, openvswitch_mod.
+ * Loads the OVS kernel module, openvswitch.
* Starts ovsdb-server, the OVS configuration database.
configuration to a known state. One effect of emer-reset is
to deconfigure any manager from the OVS database.
- * If XAPI is configured for a manger, configures the OVS
+ * If XAPI is configured for a manager, configures the OVS
manager to match with "ovs-vsctl set-manager".
The Open vSwitch boot sequence only configures an OVS configuration