Re: NetBSD-10 PVH under xen 4.16.0 working fine, but no bootloader

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

"Aaron J. Grier" <agrier%poofygoof.com@localhost> writes:

> I can't figure out the right incancation for a grub2-pvh to load a
> kernel off the VM block storage, (where to get grub2-pvh?) and ye olde
> pygrub (which works for PV instances with ffsv1) doesn't seem to work
> for PVH, so I'm loading the kernel directly with kernel=.

Your message was a little hard to follow.  I assume you are talking
about domU pvh; dom0 is a different situation.

I think most people running their own systems load the kernel as kernel=
in the xen config file.  That's fine, except that if the domU and the
dom0 are under different administrative control, the domU admin can't
swap the kernel.

It sounds like you want to use grub or something as kernel= and have
that load the kernel.  I would suggest reading the grub code to see what
interfaces are used in pv mode, and if you can switch to not use pv
memory management, but only disk.

You might also consider hvm mode.   In my experience, on one hardware
system, hvm is faster than pvh, 34s vs 46s for the standard workload of
compiling devel/m4.    This will use boot blocks in the domU, as if it
were a computer, and that's easy.  The downside is using qemu.

Note that 'hvm' in the config leads to 'pvhvm' with a NetBSD 10 kernel.