Re: NetBSD/Xen How to - suggestions

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 09:59:36PM -0600, John Hayward wrote:
> Dear Netbsd Xeners,
>    I am in the process of set up xen on NetBSD.  I have a NetBSD-4.0 
> install and using xen3.
>    I ran into a few issues in the process following the How to:
> 
> 1) When setting up grub it mentions putting the menu.lst in /grub
>    I also needed to (as mentioned in the installing with raid link at the
>    bottom of the NetBSD/Xen How to):
> ====
>    GRUB setup
> 
> # mkdir /grub
> # cp -p /usr/pkg/lib/grub/i386-/* /grub
> ====
>    It might be nice to include this step.

grub-install would have done it, it was the suggested way of installing it
before.

> 
> 2) It appears that the 4.0 generic and generic-mp kernels have a
>    Multiboot-enabled kernels (the default for NetBSD 4.x and above)
>    the "module --type=netbsd /..." did not work for me.  I needed
>    to remove the --type=netbsd on the kernel line for the items in
>    the menu.lst.  It is "exciting" when you have problems booting the
>    xen kernel (see item 3) then try to boot the "backup" generic
>    kernel and have that fail ;-)  I found about this flag in info
>    grub.

I'll add a note about it

> 
> 3) For some reason when I booted the xen.gz file as the kernel I got a
>    corrupted file error message.  I tried several times to rebuild this
>    file without success on booting.  If I uncompressed it and referenced
>    the uncompressed xen in the kernel line it booted without problem.
>    I don't know if there is something missing that while booting cannot
>    decompress the xen.gz or if there is a difference in how the
>    compression is done relative to decompression on boot.

It looks like the html isn't up to date. The XML source has a note about
grub limitation, that impose restrictions on the root filesystem
(smaller than 512Mb, formatted as FFSv1, 8k block/1k fragments).

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--