Re: Booting a NetBSD-amd64 kernel with "grub"

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

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 12:52:50AM +0100, Robert Swindells wrote:
> >Xen itself loads the binary and runs it.
> 
> Grub loads the dom0 binary and passes the address of it to Xen as part
> of the multiboot structure. The Xen kernel doesn't contain any
> filesystem or network code.
> 
> We have code in boot(8) to load the new NetBSD kernel modules, I don't
> think it would be all that much work to add an extra command that will
> load something into memory and call into it with a multiboot struct as
> a parameter. You would do something like:
> 
>   modules enable
>   load hd0a:netbsd-DOM0
>   multiboot hd0a:xen.gz dom0_mem=65536 -- bootdev=wd0a ro console=pc
> 
> I spent a fair bit of time looking into this today as the two machines
> that I would like to run Xen on would need their disks reformatting in
> order to use Grub. I will have a bit more of a play tomorrow.

That would be very nice. Can you also pass arguments to the NetBSD
kernel ? e.g.
load hd0a:netbsd-DOM0 console=tty0 -s

also, we may need to be able to load multiple modules, if we want to support
passing modules to the netbsd kernel, in the same way it's done for a native
boot.

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