freezes with NetBSD 3.99.3 / Xen 2.0.5

[Malcolm Herbert <mjch%mjch.net@localhost>]

Not sure whether this is a Xen issue or something to do with -current, 
hence the cross posting ...

I have put together a box running NetBSD/Xen with Xen kernel 2.0.5 and 
NetBSD 3.99.3.

After some initial problems getting the machine to boot with grub it 
seems to be mostly fine.  Unfortunately the machine appears to freeze 
completely for a few seconds every ten minutes or so.  On monitoring 
the console I have noticed the external USB keyboard detach and 
reattach, although the freezes still occur with it unplugged.

Also, it seems that the system clock is running slow - by almost 40 
minutes after three days and root in domain0 doesn't seem to be able to 
change it with date or ntpd.  Thirdly, whenever there is a lot of 
serial port activity (even at 9600bd) the machine seems to slow down 
markedly - I haven't done any major testing on this, but I have noticed 
that a networked mp3 stream from the machine to my hardware mp3 player 
begins to get very very choppy at the same time ...

Has anyone else noticed these problems with a setup like this?

Also, I've configured grub to use the PC console to display the menu 
and use the serial console as the console for the domain0 NetBSD 
instance.  As I use screen on the serial console I keep invoking Xen 
kernel's attention string accidentally as it uses three ^A in a row ... 
is there any way to tell Xen to use some other string, say ^T or 
something else?  Or perhaps tell Xen to ignore the serial console 
altogether and just use the PC console?

Regards,
Malcolm

--
Malcolm Herbert
Computer Support Officer
School of Geosciences
Monash University
ph 9905 4881