Re: NetBSD/xen kernel failures?

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:01:34PM -0500, John D. Baker wrote:
> I've just recently started experimenting with Xen-3 and the netbsd-4
> branch.  The first XEN3_DOM0 kernel I built worked great (after I put the
> 'noapic' command in the xen kernel command line).
> 
> I then wanted to build a custom XEN3_DOM0 kernel with all the extraneous
> device support commented out.  The resulting kernel wouldn't boot.  Xen
> complained that it wasn't a valid Xen guest kernel--that it couldn't find
> the symbol __xen_guest.  (I can't show the the actual message since I
> don't have a serial console available.)
> 
> So I rebuilt the standard XEN3_DOM0 and it now fails in the same way.
> 
> The above two kernels were built while running under Xen.  I rebooted into
> native NetBSD/i386 and rebuilt the kernels again.  These Xen kernels
> fail with an address exception, or something like that.  I'll have to
> take better notes the next time I try them, since I don't have a serial
> console.
> 
> Has anyone seen anything like the above before?  I'm currently rebuilding
> a complete NetBSD/i386 release and will try the resulting kernels once
> more.
> 
> On a related note, I can't load a NetBSD kernel with grub, even though
> I've got the entry in the /grub/menu.lst set up as described in the
> How-To (and the grub info documentation).  It complains that it's not an
> ELF file, or is otherwise an unknown file format.  At least the chainloader
> works.

It may be the same issue as the one that made me loose a few hours today
(and that I've run into before): xen doens't like large partitions and/or
ffsv1 with blocks others than 8k. The symtoms was that it refused to load
a new /xen.gz complaining it was outside the partition (this was a single
140GB partition). The old /xen.gz loaded fine, but I guess it was in
a different region of the disk. Then I made a 20GB /,
still 16k/2k block/fragment size then it complained while decompressing 
/xen.gz. I know the binary was fine, as the same one was booting just fine
on another box with a much smaller drive.
Then a reformatted using a 512MB / with 8k/1k block/fragment sizes, and all is
well.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--