Re: Re: Re: NetBSD version in Xenolinux ?

[Michael Kukat <michael%unixiron.org@localhost>]

Hi !

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Joel CARNAT wrote:
> > It's not a big surprise about Linux not having clue about ffs, but NetBSD
> > having clue (and i heard even the better implementation) of ext2 :)
>
>  I won't start the "pinguins are food" debate here :p

Hehe... okay, i couldn't resist, don't take it soo serious :)

>  Anyway, I don't really know about "goodness" of NetBSD/ext2
>  implementation. What I saw from experience is that ext3 formatted
>  partition are (or where when I test a year ago) _really_ slower than
>  seen on the linux OS.
>  maybe because the ext3 was treated as ext2 by netbsd...

Hm, never looked at ext3 in NetBSD, and my ext2 experience is quite a while
away, but i remember a situation where a friend fucked up his filesystems with
important data due to a hardware failure, and Linux had severe problems to get
things fixed or even read from this filesystem. I saved all his data (which was
physically present, and this was nearly everything) with the help of NetBSD.

But as i'm not too interested in Linux i didn't check it in detail. I just got
told the metadata handling is implemented better in *BSD, leading to a bit more
stable ext2 handling there. And it was not the
we-mount-everything-async-to-seem-fast issue :)

> > But nice to hear, and also a good hint, as i for now didn't find a working 
> > way
> > to get NetBSD running in any Xen domain, as there is no console output and 
> > the
>
>  I suppose the nicest way is running a NFS server on dom0 and booting
>  netbsd/domain1 from network. I know how to do that with a Sun, but how
>  to "boot from network" in xen ? something in the conf file I guess ?

It's just some kernel parameters to give an NFS root. I think it was even
documented somewhere, maybe in the /etc/xc/netbsd of the Xen distro.
Only problem here is that MAKEDEV doesn't feel lucky on Linux. For now i
created /dev/console by hand, just to give the kernel a console. I just need
single-user there to create all the other devnodes.

> > domain stops working quite fast. I never found this xen12loader anywhere in
>
>  wouldn't it be in that NetBSD/xen release (the one from xen FTP site) ?

It should. I never had a look at this. I got my stuff from the NetBSD ftp
server.

>  I'll try to find some time this evening to scrach my testing laptop and
>  install the NetBSD/xen distrib, to see if it ever boots.

Why scratch? Just create a new domain config and a new NFS root FS for this :)

Xen isn't intended to be reinstalled often. As soon as you start with some
flexibility in mind to create new root filesystems.

...Michael

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