I made significant progress. I decided that the debian lenny kernel was broken (although Manuel suggests that maybe it assumes that netbsd xvif support is more complete than it is). I instead got a linux kernel from xen.org's binary distribution, and that works fine and finds the xennet0 side of dom0's xvifN.0 (which it calls eth0). I was able to use the net. The debian ramdisk won't run and install with the xen.org kernel, complaining about module mismatches. I am not skilled enough in the intricacies of Linux modules and kernels to figure this out, so I gave up. I used jailtime.org ubuntu and debian pre-built images, and those basically worked ok. But, the provided xenconfig file has root="/dev/sda1 ro" This is mysterious in two ways, one of which is wrong: It's sda1 instead of xvda (apparently xvd is the Linux analog of xbd, but it's not used consistently. With ro, xen at least partially disallows writes to the image file. The linux kernel logs errors, and some changes aren't saved. But some were. I changed to rw and now things seem ok. I will would like to find the equivalent of NetBSD's INSTALL_DOMU kernel and i386.iso from build.sh's releasedir, but I don't know how to find that in the linux world. I was on the verge of trying hvm.
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