On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
The code in this branch brings in PAE support to NetBSD xeni386 (domU only) 2 new kernel configs (XEN3PAE_DOMU and INSTALL_XEN3PAE_DOMU). If there's interest in dom0 PAE support I'll look at it, but I'm not sure what it would brings over amd64, and there may be issues with userland tools accessing the hardware (mostly the X server I guess). PAE support is enbaled by 'options PAE'.
DomU PAE support allows Xen VPS providers to deliver 32-bit NetBSD VPSs without setting aside special non-PAE servers. Heh. maybe we could even get NetBSD running on ec2?
Dom0 PAE support, expecially after DomU PAE support is done, is much less important, I think.
If there was an effort, however, to backport this change to the -STABLE branch, I would be quite interested, if I could help. I'm not much of a programmer, but I can get you lots of debugging data (I'm running many NetBSD XenUs that I would be happy to move to i386PAE) and I have gobs of PAE server hardware that I can donate to the cause, if that's a bottleneck.