Re: xen advice

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 09:57:40PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
>   I'm about to replace an oldish i386 (NetBSD 3.1) box with a celeron
>   2.8 with a current generation core2duo (8200 I think) and a couple of
>   SATA 500GB HDD's that I'll run as s/w RAID1 (raidframe).  It's going
> 
> See the message linked from the xen howto describing how to set this up.
> The hard part is booting xen from raid1 via grub, but it's quite doable.
> 
> Get 4 GB of ram if you can, or at least 2 for sure.

Seconded. I'll also suggest getting a CPU that supports the VT extentions,
it's very convenient to be able to boot a cdrom image under Xen.


> [...]
> I'm not sure if you can run MP under xen.  Probably you want to start
> with xen3, and then you run the XEN3_DOM0 kernel.
> 
> The big decision is whether to run i386 or amd64.  Unless you need i386
> specifically (e.g., to run binaries like flash) I would be inclined to
> run amd64 but I haven't done that myself.  I think you can run a PAE
> i386 domU under an amd64 dom0 on current - look at the port-xen archives

Yes, you can (using a XEN3PAE_DOMU kernel). Most linux distribution comes
with xeni386 PAE kernels (not plain i386), so you need a PAE or amd64
hypervisor, and so a PAE or amd64 dom0. Or you can rebuild the Xen kernels
and modules for your distrib; I've not tried this.

> for the last month or so.  By staying with all amd64 you should be able
> to run 4.0.  I know 4.0 works fine with xen2 and i386 and it's widely
> reported ok with xen3 and i386 and I think amd64.

I've no issues with NetBSD 4.0 + Xen3. But for amd64 you need current.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--