Re: Booting a NetBSD-amd64 kernel with "grub"

[Robert Swindells <rjs%fdy2.demon.co.uk@localhost>]

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 12:52:50AM +0100, Robert Swindells wrote:
>> >Xen itself loads the binary and runs it.
>> 
>> Grub loads the dom0 binary and passes the address of it to Xen as part
>> of the multiboot structure. The Xen kernel doesn't contain any
>> filesystem or network code.
>> 
>> We have code in boot(8) to load the new NetBSD kernel modules, I don't
>> think it would be all that much work to add an extra command that will
>> load something into memory and call into it with a multiboot struct as
>> a parameter. You would do something like:
>> 
>>   modules enable
>>   load hd0a:netbsd-DOM0
>>   multiboot hd0a:xen.gz dom0_mem=65536 -- bootdev=wd0a ro console=pc
>> 
>> I spent a fair bit of time looking into this today as the two machines
>> that I would like to run Xen on would need their disks reformatting in
>> order to use Grub. I will have a bit more of a play tomorrow.

>That would be very nice. Can you also pass arguments to the NetBSD
>kernel ? e.g.
>load hd0a:netbsd-DOM0 console=tty0 -s

The bit after the "--" in the example I gave will be passed to the
dom0 guest by Xen and ignored by Xen itself.

>also, we may need to be able to load multiple modules, if we want to
>support passing modules to the netbsd kernel, in the same way it's
>done for a native boot.

I think this may just work pretty much for free too, Xen seems to
search through the list of supplied modules to find the one that is
the dom0, you would just 'load' the kernel modules as well as the dom0
kernel.

Robert Swindells