Re: NetBSD/Xen How to - suggestions

[Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric%snell-pym.org.uk@localhost>]

On 6 Feb 2008, at 12:24 am, 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?

I made my domUs boot with root-on-NFS, then just make dom0 refer to
the kernel file straight from the domU filesystem (either directly,
if dom0 is the NFS server, or by mounting the same NFS filesystem, or
at least the domU's /)

Lovely system - it makes the domUs work almost like super chroots;
you can cd into them from dom0 and change things without all that vnd
messing. And I've yet to do any benchmarks, but I have a hunch that
for some workloads, it might be faster - imagine a high-level NFS UDP
request going back and forth over xennet rather than lots of low-
level disk block requests going back and forth to perform the same
operation. And without pre-creating domU disk image files or
partitions, you don't have to guess how much disk space to give each
of them in advance, they can all share a single NFS server's space.

The downside is that it's a little harder to install. I did it by
getting the entire source for NetBSD and telling it to build into my
specified destination prefix, then going in and setting up /etc. But
I've yet to figure out how to get Linux installed into a subdirectory
on a NetBSD NFS server ;-)

ABS

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Alaric Snell-Pym
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