Subject: Re: Booting Domain0 - Problem Solved
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
From: Johnny C. Lam <jlam@pkgsrc.org>
List: port-xen
Date: 11/20/2005 22:25:39
On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 10:52:29PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 05:57:56AM -0700, John R. Shannon wrote:
> > I needed to add ahd to XEN0.
> 
> Does it work properly ? If so I'll add it to XEN0

I think XEN0 should look more like GENERIC in terms of the the network
and disk controller support that is built-in.  XENU makes sense to be
stripped down as it can only use the devices that are exported by the
privileged domain, but XEN0 needs to provide the network and disks to
the guest domains, so it should support as many as it can by default.
It was a minor stumbling block for me to install Xen for the first
time when I saw that the amr(4) RAID controller in my rather common
Dell PowerEdge server wasn't supported by XEN0 and that I would need
to compile my own kernel.

I appreciate that NetBSD/xen is still a work-in-progress, but this
change should make it easier for interested parties to test NetBSD/xen
on their modern i386 hardware without needing to compile their own
kernels.  Since Xen needs modern hardware to run anyway, I don't think
the difference between a smaller and a larger default kernel are going
to be significant details to most Xen users.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam@pkgsrc.org>