Xen on NetBSD

HOW TO do Xen3 on NetBSD 3.1

Download and install NetBSD. There are plenty of tutorials for this. Come up with a partitioning scheme. I am going with partition backed filesystems instead of file backed (performance and ease of maintenance reasons). I was coming from a FreeBSD background and was confused as to how the various partitions are accessed. Say you set up two slices with fdisk... in FreeBSD, they show up as /dev/ads1 and /dev/ads2. Not so in NetBSD. Make one uber partition of type NetBSD. Then create a wd0a about 6GB big to hold the host. Here is an example partitioning scheme. wd0a is / wd0b is 2x RAM size and is my swap wd0e is the first Xen instance wd0g is a 10GB NTFS partition wd0h is a 10GB Ext2 partition disklabel -e wd0 # /dev/rwd0d: type: unknown disk: WDC WD2500YD-01 label: flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 16 sectors/cylinder: 1008 cylinders: 486344 total sectors: 490234752 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # microseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # microseconds drivedata: 0 # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs] a: 12288528 63 4.2BSD 2048 16384 27560 # (Cyl. 0*- 12191*) b: 8192016 12288591 swap # (Cyl. 12191*- 20318*) c: 490230000 63 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0*- 486339*) d: 490234752 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 486343) e: 20482812 20482812 4.2BSD 2048 16384 27568 # (Cyl. 20320*- 40640*) f: 20482812 40965624 4.2BSD 2048 16384 27568 # (Cyl. 40640*- 60960*) g: 20482812 61448436 NTFS # (Cyl. 60960*- 81280) h: 20482812 81931248 Linux Ext2 2048 16384 # (Cyl. 81281 - 101601*) i: 20482812 102414060 4.2BSD 2048 16384 27568 # (Cyl. 101601*- 121921*) j: 40965624 143379684 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28424 # (Cyl. 142241*- 182882*) We are going to need to know the number of heads in the disk geometry ... the number NetBSD is using. fdisk Disk: /dev/rwd0d NetBSD disklabel disk geometry: cylinders: 486344, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder) total sectors: 490234752 BIOS disk geometry: cylinders: 1023, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder) total sectors: 490234752 Format the partitions and mount them # The BSD one is easy newfs /dev/wd0e # The NTFS one needs data from the disklabel output AND the mkntfs program # install mkntfs into: /usr/pkg/sbin/ # run fdisk to get the number of heads that NetBSD is using... not the BIOS cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/ntfsprogs/ && make install clean mkntfs --ntfs-version 3.1 --sector-size 512 --heads 16 \ --partition-start 61448436 --sectors-per-track 63 --fast --label ShitItWorks --/dev/wd0g # Next set up another partition for Linux # install e2fs into: /usr/pkg/sbin/ cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/e2fsprogs/ && make install clean mke2fs -j -L XenExt3 /dev/wd0h # set a special mount point for all your Xen partitions. mkdir /xen mkdir /xen/wd0e mkdir /xen/wd0f mkdir /xen/wd0g mkdir /xen/wd0h mkdir /xen/wd0i mkdir /xen/wd0j # add these lines to your /etc/fstab ### Xen partitions # Note: all ntfs partitions need 0 and 0 in the last two columns. /dev/wd0e /xen/wd0e ffs rw 2 2 /dev/wd0f /xen/wd0f ffs rw 2 2 /dev/wd0g /xen/wd0g ntfs rw 0 0 /dev/wd0h /xen/wd0h ext2fs rw 2 2 /dev/wd0i /xen/wd0i ffs rw 2 2 /dev/wd0j /xen/wd0j ffs rw 2 2 # now try mounting them! mount /xen/wd0g mount /xen/wd0i mount /xen/wd0j # run the mount command to see if they worked! mount # also run df to check the partition sizes. I like the -m flag... df -m # Want something more Human Readable? Try this: df -h Install the Xen2 kernel and grub (When netBSD 4.x is stable, you can switch to Xen3) cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/xenkernel20/ && make install clean cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/xentools20/ && make install clean cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/grub/ && make install clean Download your kernel from netbsd.org... depends on your version and ARCH: eg, ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/i386/binary/kernel Configure Grub I used this HOW-TO to set up grub. Reboot! It works! (hopefully) Set up domN instances.