Slackware has been a staple in the linux community since the beginning and its great to see another release as this distribution evolves thanks to the hard work by Patrick J. Volkerding. Slackware 12.1 was released yesterday and boasts a 2.6.24.5 kernel, and of course the simplicity, stability and security we’ve always expected and recieved from this distro.
OpenBSD 4.3 was publicly released on schedule last week with astonishing amount of improvements, new features, and bug fixes. Hats off to the OpenBSD Developers that are putting out some great work to make a stable and reliable product.
However, I must say, I did notice some bug fixes in the changelogs that I’ve actually came across and been caught up on that were fixed in this release. These issues had been referenced in the openbsd mailing lists by other users but were never acknowledged by the developers leaving me frustrated and at a dead end without getting into the code. Its good to see these issues finally acknowledged in the changelog.
So the other day I noticed my /var partition filled up in on my Dom0. One of the symtoms was not allowing me to start up any more DomU’s. So I tracked the disk usage to /var/lib/xen/save. There were files of each of my running dom u’s here which were the culprit.
Apparently, on a Debian system, upon a shutdown of the Dom0, Xen attempts to take a snapshot of the running DomU instead of issuing a shutdown command across all the DomU’s. This snapshot is stored in - you guessed it - /var/lib/xen/save - and is controlled by the XENDOMAINS_SAVE parameter in /etc/default/xendomains. In order to disable this future and always execute a shutdown of DomU’s during a shutdown of the Dom0, you can set XENDOMAINS_SAVE=”". The corresponding restore command is controlled by XENDOMAINS_RESTORE parameter. It is also safe to delete these files provided you have a newer instance of the DomU.
After realizing this I changed the path of where the running domains are stored to in case of a shutdown to a partition with sufficient space to hold the running instances. I also set the XENDOMAINS_RESTORE=true.
Thanks to the helpful individuals on the xen-users mailing lists for the info.