Overview

How to add paravirtualisation to CentOS v5.2.

Problem

In order to replicate a customer environment, we have some CentOS 5.2 virtual machines for development. However CentOS 5.2 does not feature any paravirtualisation and thus the performance of both the guest and host machines suffers.

Solution

By creating a custom Linux kernel with paravirtualisation support and making some adjustments to the initial ramdisk used for booting, we created a paravirtualised CentOS 5.2 machine.

Howto

First of all we must build the kernel: