[xen-tools-dev] Cherry-picked most of your xen-tools patches

[Nathan O'Sullivan]

> The only commit where I'm not sure how helpful it would be for a wider
> group of users is the disabling of plymouth. While I can imagine that
> plymouth doesn't make much sense in a DomU, I didn't have noticed any
> problems with it. OTOH I don't use Xen's VNC feature (yet).
>    
I'm not an expert at the deep internals of linux so please accept the 
following explanation may not be entirely accurate; its just what I see 
happen.

When Plymouth starts the linux virtual terminal is changed to tty7 (ie, 
what happens when you press ctrl+shift+f7 on a real PC) - this seems to 
happen even when it stays in text mode. Xen VNC respects this, it seems 
to be a pretty close copy of what you see on a real PC.

I confirmed it was actually showing tty7 by SSH'ing into the domU and 
running getty on each tty until I saw a login prompt appear on VNC.

I suppose this isnt really whats supposed to happen when plymouth starts 
(since its supposed to just hand off to some other program?), but 
plymouth crashes and I guess you are left stuck on tty7. The standard 
change-terminal key combinations either dont work over VNC or my client 
doesn't send them.

If however plymouth is disabled, the virtual console never switches away 
from tty1 and so the regular getty on tty1 is still visible over VNC 
allowing standard login.

I expect many people use the xvc0/hvc0 with xm console; its also 
possible there's a way to make Plymouth not crash. From what I can see 
it provides no useful functionality for a server and we need VNC for our 
customers, so I was happy to disable it.

Regards
Nathan