Recent Xen-related Changes to NetBSD-current

With all the emphasis on NetBSD-5.0 over the last few months (and, yes, it's looking good now, there may be a third release candidate, and the final bits are being polished off now), NetBSD-current has taken a back seat. Whilst this is quite understandable, there have been some really neat features added recently. Manuel Bouyer has done even more work on NetBSD/Xen, and has added support for an i386 domain0 kernel with PAE support - this requires a i386PAE or x86_64 hypervisor (available in pkgsrc).

He has also added a PCI pass-through support for Xen3. The dom0 kernel gets a pciback PCI driver, to which the device specified in the pciback.hide boot parameter will attach. DomU kernels get a xpci device, to which pci buses will attach.

The virtualisation benefits of NetBSD are growing even more, with the recent sighting of a jym-xensuspend branch in the repository. This branch contains the code required to support the Xen save/restore/migrate facilities. It affects domU frontend drivers (xbd, xennet, xencons, hypervisor), autoconf(9) machinery, as well as MD code (mostly pmap(9)).

I have to thank both Manuel Bouyer and Jen-Yves Migeon for doing so much great work with NetBSD/Xen - formidable