Re: netbsd-5 on Citrix XenClient 2.1 (on an HP EliteBook 8460p)

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Thu, 2 Feb 2012, Jeff Rizzo wrote:
> On 2/2/12 4:24 PM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > re0 (and re1 when the wireless is active) is throwing "watchdog timeout"
> > warnings on the kernel which may correspond to some of the freezes.
>
> This is a known issue;  most Xen implementations don't provide interrupts 
> properly for the re(4) driver, but it actually works OK if you let the rtk(4) 
> driver match, either by commenting out re(4) or using userconf to disable re, 
> which you can do from boot.cfg.  I don't know whether Xenserver allows you to 
> change the emulation, but the wm(4) one works better.  :)

XenServer != XenClient

I've had NetBSD running on XenClient since the pre-1.0 tech preview days 
and haven't noticed the pauses.

After my 2.1 upgrade^Wreinstall, I've not had chance to put NetBSD back on 
yet. However, my interest is mainly in getting it to run as a PV guest 
rather than HVM. My work on generating .xva files for XenServer and 
importing the relevant guest tools into pkgsrc has been good. So it 
shouldn't be much of a leap to get it working under XenClient too.

There are a few problems/trickinesses however:
- In depth VM config cannot be altered from gui, so the JSON-like db files 
must be manually altered. The syntax is not publically documented.
- There's no serial console-like mechanism, so getting a console could be 
tough. XenServer is happy with text-based PV consoles and attaches a vnc 
instance to them. XenClient doesn't have that functionality.

I've chatted to some of the Citrix senior engineers about this. For the 
config, the settings can be inferred from the UIVM (Receiver) settings as 
that is a full PV guest. For the console, the xenfb2 driver needs porting. 
This can be found on the source ISO (but I expect it to be GPL).

http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/results.asp?productID=2300325
(requires MyCitrix account)

With xenfb2, you'll be able to switch to the console with Ctrl+number keys 
as with any other guest.

--
Stephen