Re: Problems booting NetBSD/Xen on Intel NUC 12 Extreme w/ i9-12900

[Johan Stenstam <johani%johani.org@localhost>]

Hi, and thanks for the quick responses.

> On 10 May 2023, at 21:04, Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> Johan Stenstam <johani%johani.org@localhost> writes:
> 
>> 2. How important is it to keep in exact sync between xenkernelNNN and
>> xentoolsMMM? I.e. assuming I get past the current crash and get a
>> running system with xenkernel415, is it imperative that I find a
>> xentools415 to go with it or would xentools413 be sufficient?

From Brian:

> 1.  It's critical that the xenkernel and xentools packages be the same version.  While you
> might be able to boot a dom0 with a mismatched xenkernel relative to the xentools you have
> installed, when the system comes up and begins configuring itself to support domains, including
> dom0, things will either behave very strangely, or the system may crash in unexpected ways.

Ok, good. That’s what I’ve always done, so the absence of the xentools415 binary package isn’t an indication that this can be relaxed. Gotcha.

> I built xentools415 on March 14, as part of testing what was to become
> 2023Q1.  The host was netbsd-10 (so 10_BETA). I would recommend testing
> with 10 rather than 9 for a new system.

That’s fine with me. As I’ve failed to build xentools415 myself, I’d be happy to take the package for any version of NetBSD at the moment and 10_BETA has been working fine for the very limited testing I’ve done so far (to me Xen is basically everything, without Xen I can just as well shut off the box and go watch a movie instead).

>> 3. When trying 10_BETA + xenkernel415 I notice that the distribution
>> doesn’t include the kernel modules,
>> i.e. /stand/amd64-xen/10.0/modules/ is empty. It seems that there is
>> no difference in the .kmods between GENERIC and XEN_DOM0 systems, so I
>> just copied them over. But it surprises me as one of the things that
>> will be much improved with NetBSD 10 is Xen performance, so why then
>> isn’t the distribution kit complete?
> 
> It's a bug that you need separate  modules, and my understanding is that
> as of 10, you don't.

Aha. Great. As they (the .kmod files) are identical to each other also in 9.3 that’s an obvious improvement.

>> 4. What should I try next to get this running?
> 
> The suggestion you received about more RAM is a good one.

Tried that now. I bumped dom0_mem to 1024M. No difference unfortunately.

> There is surely a way to get debugging.  Adding -d to the NetBSD boot
> might help.  It might be possible to use kgdb on serial.

I have no idea of how to get a serial line into this box and adding ‘-d’ caused the screen to go dark instead.

> I will be updating my box and will try 4.15, but it's a 2012ish
> computer.
> 
> You are asking in the right place

Good :-)

Regards,
Johan