Subject: Re: NetBSD/Xen How to - suggestions
To: Sarton O'Brien <bsd-xen@roguewrt.org>
From: Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>
List: port-xen
Date: 02/05/2008 19:50:40
"Sarton O'Brien" <bsd-xen@roguewrt.org> writes:

> Hubert Feyrer wrote:
>> On Wed, 6 Feb 2008, Sarton O'Brien wrote:
>>> Has anyone played with grub2?
>>
>> No, but while on the subject: has anyone played with pygrub (or is
>> there an alternative), to not require domU kernels sit on the dom0
>> file system?
>
> Being part of xentools I'd imagine there are probably only two people
> on this list that could even attempt it's use :)
>
> I'm curious of the perceived benefits ... other than manual config
> changes and the consolidation of the running kernel and the domu
> reference kernel ... Is the benefit mainly time saving?

To me it's broken that the domU kernel isn't taken from /netbsd in the
domU filesystem.

When i update a machine, I update kernel and user, and it would be good
for a domU to be able to do this in one operation without dom0 access,
just like a real machine.

So, I'd like to see 'xm start' be able to mount the domU vnd from a file
read-only, grab the kernel, unmount, and then boot with the kernel file
and the vnds configured normally.  But I have not liked this enough to
actually do it :-)

So I think you're right about the benefits being having the real and
reference kernel being the same, and not having to update twice, but I
think that's pretty important.