xen

From NetBSD Wiki

NetBSD/xen
Status:	active
First:	3.0
Last:
Maintainer:	Manuel Bouyer

NetBSD/xen is a port of NetBSD to the Xen virtual machine monitor.

• The following paragraph is taken from the pkgsrc DESCR

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 hardware (runs only on i686-class CPUs), which supports running multiple guest operating systems on a single machine. Guest OSs (also called "domains") require a modified kernel which supports Xen hypercalls in replacement to access to the physical hardware. At boot, the xen kernel is loaded (via grub) along with the guest kernel for the first domain (called domain0). domain0 has privileges to access the physical hardware (PCI and ISA devices), administrate other domains and provide virtual devices (disks and network) to other domains.

Packages exist for both Xen2 and Xen3 kernels and tools. As of this writing the Xen2 implemention is more mature and more stable but has inherent limitations of which the Xen3 implementation attempts to address. Some of these limitations however, are still unsupported within the NetBSD/xen port of Xen3.

Currently, Xen3 requires the options "noapic acpi=off nosmp" to be passed to the Xen3 kernel for stable operation on an SMP architecture. For this reason the Xen2 port may be more desirable. Configuration and implementation of Xen2 can be referenced at the official NetBSD/xen Howto

Configuring Xen3 is subtly different than configuring Xen2 but essentially, slightly less complex.

See the xen3-install:xen document for assistance.