Re: netbsd/xen booting on an EPIA-5000

[Florian Heigl <floh%deranfangvomen.de@localhost>]

hi,

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 07:55:31PM -0500, Chris Brookes wrote:
> I've been trying without much success to get NetBSD/xen booting as
> domain0 on a VIA EPIA-5000 motherboard. The machine launches GRUB,
> GRUB appears to successfully load xen.gz, and then seemingly as soon
> as my xen0 kernel is accessed I get a reboot. I'm pretty confident
> that my installation is sound: if I take the system and swap only the
> VIA motherboard/cpu for a generic Intel Mobo/Intel P3 combo, the same
> disk boots in to the Xen0 kernel straight away, so I am guessing a
> problem with the VIA C3 CPU?

You're out for various problems, which I unfortunately couldn't yet 
resolve myself. 

As far as I understand, the problem lies with a difference in page size
(8K vs. 4K) between Via and AMD/Intel CPUs; as far as I can tell, it's no 
586 vs. 686 problem, the VIA CPU's have been 686-compatible for some time now.

You definitely want to look at the following list post:
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2005-05/msg00579.html

the original patches apply up to xen-src 2.0.1, later I've had some
problems. The bad news is I still didn't get a booting dom0 with that,
the system reset after scrubbing dom0 ram.

You should think about forwarding Your question to the xen-devel list,
as this is really a Xen-wise problem. At the moment I can't do any
testing (I've got the one power problem a UPS can't solve. *g*), but
it'd be great if You could at least forward it.
Give them the exact cpu specs from dmesg, as I'm not sure it's the
problem You see with Your system, but it well sounds like it.


regards and good luck,
florian

(I've bought 2 low-end VIA-based boards, with two more in queue, which 
were out to become a nice clustered xen solution to replace my original
quad ppro system)