Re: [Xen-devel] Anyone done this before? Netbsd on Debian

["Christoph Egger" <Christoph.Egger@xxxxxxx>]

On Monday 29 January 2007 11:33, Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 29/1/07 09:59, "Christoph Egger" <Christoph.Egger@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > There are two ways:
> >
> > 1. Implement PAE support in NetBSD
> > 2. Make non-PAE guests in PAE Hypervisor work properly
> >
> > The first point is NetBSD-related, the second is Xen related.
>
> Option (2) will require shadow pagetables, which is halfway to running the
> guest as an HVM guest (which you can of course try -- it should work fine
> as long as the bootloader real-mode code runs okay).

NetBSD has been paravirtualized a long time ago. It supports Xen2 and Xen3.
Xen1 has been dropped when support for Xen2 has been added.

It is usable as both Dom0 and DomU.

> Option (1) has to be the long-term strategy -- then NetBSD can run on PAE
> or x64 hypervisor.  Long term we would like to kill off the 32-bit non-pae
> hypervisor build and thus reduce the test matrix.

That's easy to do since OpenBSD/i386 supports PAE. The code between OpenBSD
and NetBSD is so similar that the porting effort to NetBSD drops nearly down 
to copying & adjusting the code. It should be doable in two weeks. If you are 
familiar with the code, then it's even doable in one week.

Christoph




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