Re: Instant reboot when booting xen as guided ...

[Jens Rehsack <rehsack%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 14.08.2012 21:55, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 06:07:09PM +0000, Jens Rehsack wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I want to prepare a machine for the NetBSD stand at the FrOSCon
>> (http://www.froscon.de/en/home/) running NetBSD-6 as Xen-Dom0.
>>
>> So I simply installed NetBSD-6 and pkgsrc/sysutils/xen*41, copies
>> /usr/pkg/xen41-kernel/xen.gz into / (/usr is an own filesystem) and
>> added following lines to /boot.cfg:
>>
>>> menu=Boot Xen with 4096MB for dom0:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0
>> console=pc;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=4096M
>>> menu=Boot Xen with dom0 in single-user mode:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0
>> -s;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=4096M
>>
>> However, when booting one of them (I started with the single user
>> mode to avoid issues ...), it first blames about missing
>> //ffs/ffs.ko (or ffs.kmod - unsure), fails to enable the CPU's and
>> finally reboots when doing something with the free memory.
>>
>> Any ideas what is going wrong?
> 
> Can you try with less memory for dom0 ? there has been problems with
> large dom0 memory in the past.

Tried with 512M and beside the other errors it boots the NetBSD kernel
after cleaning/checking the free memory. This was the crash situation
when using 4G mem for Dom0.

> I don't understand how it fails to enable the CPUs (dom0 is still UP),
> so there may be something else wrong here. Did you build your own kernel,
> or did you use a snapshot ?

NetBSD-Kernel (which isn't active at this moment) or xenkernel - there
I used the one from pkgsrc.

I build an own NetBSD kernel - even for the DOM0 variant, but I only
removed some unnecessary SCSI and network drivers as well as BT and TV
capturing. The procedure worked fine on my Laptop during some tests
using 5-CURRENT last year, but was incredible slow using X11 in Dom0
(slower CPU's, Quattro FX 570M-NV graphic card), so I expected the
Workstation with 16G RAM, 8 Xeon cores and and ATI 6950 graphic card
should be fast enough to demonstrate the power of NetBSD even with
some DomU's running ...

Jens