Subject: Xen 1.2 consoles and virtual disks.
To: None <port-xen@netbsd.org>
From: Andrew Gillham <gillham@gmail.com>
List: port-xen
Date: 02/07/2005 15:53:43
I fired up Xen yesterday with NetBSD/i386 2.0.1 as my based for the domain0 OS.

I was able to get a NetBSD guest domain up without too much trouble as well.

I know a few people are using Xen and I'm assuming it is 1.2 since
Manuel is busy working on 2.0 support, so I would like to find out
what the level of support is for a couple of things.

Is it possible to get a bi-directional console going on the guest OS? 
I can get the output that is dumped to the internal network, but is
there a way to get a "serial console" style connection like the 2.0
xencons provides?

Does the Xen virtual disk (VD) stuff work under NetBSD?  I tried to
initialise a partition using the script, but it gets an SQL error and
I couldn't figure it out from looking at the code.
(see below)

If the virtual disk stuff doesn't work, does it work ok to have the
guest domains use physical partitions?  Can the partitions be in an
MBR extended partition?

-Andrew

(xmd is just a symlink, the same error occurs with xc_vd_tool.py)
shadow# xmd initialise wd0e
No extent size specified - using default size of 64MB
Formatting for virtual disks
Device: wd0e
Extent size: 64MB
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/pkg/bin/xmd", line 53, in ?
    rc = XenoUtil.vd_format(dev, extent_size)
  File "/usr/pkg/lib/python2.3/site-packages/XenoUtil.py", line 346,
in vd_format
    cu.execute("INSERT INTO vdisk_part(partition, part_id, extent_size) " +
  File "/usr/pkg/lib/python2.3/site-packages/sqlite/main.py", line
244, in execute
    self.rs = self.con.db.execute(SQL)
_sqlite.DatabaseError: no such column: None