Hello @ack thanks for your interest and reply.
To directly answer your question to be honest I am interested in both possibly managing Xen with MaaS and running MaaS on top of Xen. I hope my below post goes into detail and provides further clarity in regards to my objectives.
According to my amateur knowledge. I was planning to use the Xen hypervisor to run an image supported by Xen such as Ubuntu 20.xx which can be run with Dom0 kernel. I was hoping to run MaaS apt/snap afterwards and then run this Charmed OpenStack via JuJu. I have attached some links with reference to the subject material and I am a software engineering student so I am very interested in combining these technologies if possible, experiment further and report back my findings to the community while enjoying the learning process and growth along the way.
I have attached a Network Diagram
image of my homelab for further clarity. Although I am aware I could run all of this on a single host I am interested in learning about the actual production applications of HA clusters and High Performance Computing. I was planning to use my cluster of 5x RPi4Bs 8GB with SD cards and USB Enclosure SSDs as my production cluster. I have another 4GB RPI4 for development purposes and my home router is currently an OpenWRT flashed TP Link, as indicated in my Network Diagram. My original goal was to learn DevOps and iterate rapid deployments and changes to my Dev PI, then if all was working well, I would deploy the changes to my production cluster.
I have followed this PXE RPI4 guide and tried to attempt UEFI legacy booting using my OpenWRT router as a TFTP server. I am not sure if this is the best approach but based on my end goals and current homelab setup I thought at the time of this project that this was the most feasible and easiest option to execute. But after attempting to deploy and execute I am being humbled by so many errors and challenges over the past few months.
I have seen this discourse post and this one. I have also watched this youtube video but it seems to deviate in terms of using automation tools that aren’t widely supported or used in the workplace (Py-Infra instead of Ansible) and he doesn’t use his router to TFTP the Pi IIRC, correct me if i’m wrong here.
I have read this article officially released by Xen detailing how they got the hypervisor running on RPI4 but I’m not sure if I am too dumb to understand this but the last time I tried mkimage I got an error because boot.source couldn’t be found. I used the u-boot.bin from Ubuntu latest LTS image.
I have checked the official guide for Xen for Beginners but there isn’t any mention of the RPI4 asides from that article I linked above. There is also this image building script I found for Xen but I am not sure about the boot.source part.
Right now the challenges I am facing are:
- Getting PXE cloud-booting on my RPI4s with either SSDs and/or SD attached. Would prefer using my OpenWRT router but it seems the UEFI legacy booting may be a problem. The discourse posts linked above indicated otherwise.
- Successfully boot Ubuntu with Dom0 kernel on RPI4 and get Xen working.
- Install MaaS and connect cluster together.
- Run Charmed OpenStack JuJu.
I hope I have made my objectives, end goals along with the steps I have taken thus far very clear. Kindly let me know if there is any further clarification needed and I will reply as soon as I am available.
Thank you for your time and attention and I would greatly appreciate any insights as I am very passionate about self hosting my own HA cloud in my homelab.
Edit: Forgot to mention my latest finding while researching this topic; It was this project called Yocto which seems similar to what EVE is trying to achieve in embedded systems. The youtube video here and the slides linked in the description detail how they were able to get Xen hypervisor running. I wasn’t sure what to make of it but I was impressed so I thought I may as well add that for further reference if it helps me achieve the final objective.
