Re: recommendations for a Xen/NetBSD box?

[Luke S Crawford <lsc%prgmr.com@localhost>]

Carl Brewer <carl%bl.echidna.id.au@localhost> writes:
> Dumb question, PAE means exactly?  Is there an FAQ I need to go
> through before I ask any more? :)

PAE is the CPU level support for more than 4GB ram on 32-bit archetectures.
just about everything 32-bit from the p4 onward supports it, as 
4Gb isn't so much anymore.   It needs OS support, though, as well
as hardware support, and the feeling in the NetBSD community has been
'just use x86_64' for some time.  

> that, but -current is not an option.  Proper releases only.  There's a
> xen kernel that comes with 4.0 and 3.1, it's Xen 3 I think?

netbsd 3.1 supports xen3 as a DomU only, xen 2 as a domU and Dom0
NetBSD 4 supports xen3 as both.  (but -release only supports x86_64
or i386 without PAE.)  

> I also have a CentOS (RHEL) 5 box, that is a development box I use to
> test & devel on before installing into a co-located server interstate
> in a data center, running the same (CentOS 5).  This needs to be as
> bog-standard as possible as I don't have console access to the remote
> box so it needs to be standard and stable, which is why it's a RHEL
> ripoff, not one of the other more volatile distros.

Hm.  well,  it sounds like the best option then would be to go non-pae

you could use a NetBSD 4 Dom0; or re-compile a linux kernel without
pae for the Dom0; then   you could use your existing NetBSD images,
but you would need  to re-compile most distro kernels;  I don't know of 
any xen linux distro kernels that aren't PAE by default.