Subject: NetBSD/xen kernel failures?
To: None <port-xen@netbsd.org>
From: John D. Baker <jdbaker@mylinuxisp.com>
List: port-xen
Date: 10/17/2006 12:01:34
I've just recently started experimenting with Xen-3 and the netbsd-4
branch.  The first XEN3_DOM0 kernel I built worked great (after I put the
'noapic' command in the xen kernel command line).

I then wanted to build a custom XEN3_DOM0 kernel with all the extraneous
device support commented out.  The resulting kernel wouldn't boot.  Xen
complained that it wasn't a valid Xen guest kernel--that it couldn't find
the symbol __xen_guest.  (I can't show the the actual message since I
don't have a serial console available.)

So I rebuilt the standard XEN3_DOM0 and it now fails in the same way.

The above two kernels were built while running under Xen.  I rebooted into
native NetBSD/i386 and rebuilt the kernels again.  These Xen kernels
fail with an address exception, or something like that.  I'll have to
take better notes the next time I try them, since I don't have a serial
console.

Has anyone seen anything like the above before?  I'm currently rebuilding
a complete NetBSD/i386 release and will try the resulting kernels once
more.

On a related note, I can't load a NetBSD kernel with grub, even though
I've got the entry in the /grub/menu.lst set up as described in the
How-To (and the grub info documentation).  It complains that it's not an
ELF file, or is otherwise an unknown file format.  At least the chainloader
works.

-- 
John D. Baker, KN5UKS                    NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
jdbaker(at)mylinuxisp(dot)com                 OpenBSD            FreeBSD
BSD -- It just sits there and _works_!
GPG fingerprint:  D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645