UKUUG
is next weekend, and although I can’t spare a whole weekend I really want to catch the Xen talks on Saturday morning.
I’ve been following Xen for about 18 months and to my shame I still haven’t got further than building a dom0 kernel and running that as my desktop for 9 months…
In my defence, my weapon of choice has no dom0 and very sketchy domU support, but NetBSD has been stable in dom0 for nearly a year now, and I’ve had NetBSD around the place since last century.
My main problem has been the lack of a serial console on my netbsd gateway (all my mini-itx boxes are headless as they all live in the front room where there’s no room for monitors).
It’s made upgrading the box very dangerous (every buildworld invariably kills the box ) and dicking about with Xen out of the question.
Adding a serial console to NetBSD:
- needs a buildworld (see above)
- is badly documented (rare for netbsd)
- kills your EPIA boxes (I found this when I tried to install on a new EPIA, luckily. That was when I started using FreeBSD again).
According to the bug report, the bootcode errors are now fixed. But I have a better plan.
I need grub anyway for Xen, and grub does serial consoles fine.
Slight problem was that grub can need a bit of massaging to work with non-linuxes, but that’s no biggy now as the NetBSD/xen howto , bless it, has a section on serial consoles.
(in all honesty, my WRT54G arrived last night, so it’d probably be simpler just to flatten the old NetBSD box and sell it to make glue, but I would like a Xen box and it seems like a good candidate).