Re: Suggestions for upgrading dom0

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Keep in mind that aside from availability issues, typically if the xen
kernel and dom0 kernel boot, having the domUs not come us is not a bar
to sshing into the dom0 to fix it.

If you have a boot line to boot non-xen and a serial console, this seems
very workable.  If you don't, you might want to set up a local machine
similarly and test out the steps, if that's less work than traveling.

Definitely you are right to worry about rc.d scripts; I use
PKG_RCD_SCRIPTS=yes and try not to write them.

the xen howto may talk about xm->xl conversion, but the xendomains
script does it mostly.


I've done updates like this, across netbsd and across xen, multiple
times, with relatively little trouble.

I would advise updating one first, and then the other, and not trying
both at once.  You are describing moving to 8 without changing packages
(and /xen.gz copied from the xen-kernel package), and then packages,
which sounds good.

The other thing to think about is bootblocks and /boot.  You didn't
mention netbsd boot vs grub.   I think from 6 to 8 there are no new boot
issues and boot blocks that boot 6 will boot 8.  But I remember very
dimly that NetBSD 4 to 5 on sparc  was tricky, because the NetBSD 3
bootblocks would boot 4 but not 5, and I probably have the details wrong
- could be sparc64, and different versions.  But the point remains that
in general it can be trouble.