Re: installing a 4.1 DOMU

[Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau%entel.upc.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 3:43 AM, Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:34:01 +0100
> Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau%entel.upc.edu@localhost> wrote:
>
>> xl is not supported on xen 4.1 on NetBSD, and is still considered as
>> an experimental toolstack even on Linux (xend/xm is the recommended
>> toolstack in 4.1), so the results using xl might vary.
>
> OK, however xl is being used by the xendomains rc.d script.  It also
> seems more reliable to me than xend, but perhaps that is just my luck.

Yes, xm is going to be deprecated in the next xen release, and we are
working on porting xl to NetBSD, the next release will have full xl
support for NetBSD.

>
>> Can you use vnd0 instead and vnd0a and xvda instead of hda1? I would
>> recommend using the image file as a whole disk instead of a partition.
>>
>> disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vnd0,xvda,w' ]
>
> Actually not.  There is no /dev/vnd0 file so /dev/vnd0a is required.  As
> far as I can tell, the second argument does not matter.  I have tried
> hda1, xvda, 0x1 and 0x01; all work fine.  According to the NetBSD Xen
> Howto (http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto.html) that field is just an
> index for NetBSD DOMUs and is not really used.  Does that comment still
> apply?

AFAIK, this prefixes are just translated to indexes, but I won't
recommend using hda because it's commonly used in HVM domains, and
usually means emulated hard drive instead of the PV one (when using PV
disks xvda is commonly used). It's just a convention that people
normally use, and I think it has no effect on how the device is
plugged into the domain.

>> > How is the root filesystem supposed to be defined?
>>
>> If you replace hda1 with xvda this should work fine under xm.
>
> Actually, it turns out that no definition for 'root' is required.
>
> Cheers,
> Brook