Manuel Bouyer <[email protected]> writes: > On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 09:53:50AM +0100, Patrick Welche wrote: >> I have tried and failed to run xen on 3 -current/amd64 systems with >> 3 different failure modes: >> >> 1) laptop: xen.gz Building a PV Dom0 / ELF: not an ELF binary -> >> panic/reboot >> 2) desktop: XEN3_DOM0 panics including PR port-xen/55978 >> 3) server: Trampoline space cannot be allocated; will try fallback -> reboot >> >> They are all working NetBSD-current/amd64 systems. >> >> My conclusion was that xen is hopelessly broken, so was quite surprised >> by Greg Wood's thread about the finer points of running a guest OS, given >> that those systems won't even start the host OS. >> >> I dug out an old desktop, and to my pleasant surprise it booted XEN3_DOM0, >> and I have managed to run some XEN3_DOMUs. >> >> The difference between the working/broken setups seems to be that the >> working one is "BIOS" booting rather than EFI booting. >> >> Among all your xen success stories, are any of you EFI booting? > > AFAIK EFI is not yet supported by Xen (maybe this is supported by 4.15, > I've not had a chance to try yet). I have it running on fairly recent > Dell servers (in BIOS mode)
There has been fiddling with Xen and EFI for quite some time. See: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_EFI for example (might be old)... this indicates that Xen 4.3 or later could be built as a EFI binary and probably booted from the EFI firmware directly or with grub2 when grub2 is a EFI binary itself. Of course those instructions are all Linux-centric and I don't know if you created a Xen kernel like this if it would boot a NetBSD DOM0 kernel. I am in no position to try any tests with this right now personally, but it is tempting as I have a EFI only laptop that I could probably replace the hard drive temporarily. -- Brad Spencer - [email protected] - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
