Dan, Andreas, Luke, Ober,

Let me reply to all of you in one email. Thanks for the hints, now I 
have more...

It is just for the record from this stage but it will be still worth for 
others who may want to use similar config. I am 99% sure that the 
problem is the smartarray 5i controller or its cciss driver provided by 
NetBSD team.

I took 1 CPU out of my server, left the HT off and just in case passed 
the noapic+nosmp params to the kernel even though they are irrelevant 
from this stage. (The kernel still has SMP support built in what I will 
perhaps remove in the next couple of days and recompile just in case)

NO! Same problem, domU crashed.

Then I basically dumped the same install onto a desktop box with a P4 
2.4Ghz+1GB ram, SCSI hdd. The same config I pasted into my previous 
email fired up the netbsd 3.1RC2 install like charm. I was so happy to 
see a blue screen appearing under Xen. (and it wasn't an NT core dump :) )

But it won't fix my root problem unfortunately. I still can't use Xen on 
my production box with BSD and of course I won't be able to replace my 
server with a crappy desktop hardware so quite likely we will use over 
engineered SuSE for domU. Really frustrating. Unfortunately we have to 
sacrifice our stable BSD systems to achieve virtualization what we more 
need at present than anything else.

I should have thought about the cciss driver...it was a clear indication 
when my dom0 crashed at that stage.

Thanks for the tips all of you.

Ivan