Re: Call for testing: Xen 4.2.0-rc4

[Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau%citrix.com@localhost>]

Andreas Gustafsson wrote:
> On September 10, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
>> Xen has recently tagged the next rc of the 4.2 version, which should
>> include full NetBSD support without the need of additional patches. It
>> would be very helpful if you test this release and notify any bugs
>> found, to either port-xen%netbsd.org@localhost or 
>> xen-devel%lists.xen.org@localhost.
> [...]
>> Xend has been deprecated in 4.2, so I won't recommend using it anymore,
>> but if you plan on using xend, you should start it also:
>>
>> #/usr/xen42/etc/rc.d/xend onestart
> 
> When I run this (after installing with a prefix of /xen42), xend fails
> to start, but no error messages are printed:
> 
>   # /xen42/etc/rc.d/xend onestart
>   Starting xenbackendd.
>   Starting xend.
>   # 
> 
> I see that the /xen42/etc/rc.d/xend script redirects the error
> messages from "${SBINDIR}/xend start" to /dev/null...  Running
> "/xen42/sbin/xend start" manually from the shell shows that it
> fails because it tries to start "blktapctrl" but no such program
> is installed.

Yes, this is caused by the patch that I send before to enable
compilation in NetBSD 5.1, if you want to use xend it looks like it
depends on blktap, so you need to enable that, remove the following
lines from my patch:

-SUBDIRS-$(CONFIG_NetBSD) += $(SUBDIRS-libaio)
-SUBDIRS-$(CONFIG_NetBSD) += blktap2

This will enable blktap compilation again (although blktap is not
functional on NetBSD).

>> whatever you feel should work on xend, should also work on xl.
> 
> Does this mean the caveat discussed in
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-xen/2012/04/11/msg007216.html
> no longer applies?

No, this no longer applies. You can create guests that use a raw file as
a disk, and xl will take care of attaching that to the vnd device and
provide the correct block device to the guest. Lines like the following
should work without problems:

disk = [ 'file:/path/to/my/file.img,xvda,w']