NetBSD/xen

About NetBSD/xen

NetBSD/xen is a port of NetBSD to the Xen virtual machine monitor. It was first brought to NetBSD by Christian Limpach and committed to the source tree on March 11th, 2004.

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software.

See http://www.xen.org/ for more details on Xen.

The current maintainer of NetBSD/xen is Manuel Bouyer.

NetBSD/xen News

2009-03-05:   Xen3 PCI pass-through

PCI pass-through support has been added for both domain0 and domU. domain0 kernel gets a pciback PCI drivers, to which device specified in the pciback.hide boot parameter will attach. DomU kernels gets a xpci device, to which pci busses will attach. More details in the NetBSD/xen Howto.

2009-03-05:   i386 PAE domain0 support

Missing pieces for a domain0 kernel supporting the i386 PAE extensions has been added to current. A new kernel XEN3PAE_DOM0 should show up in the next HEAD autobuild. This kernel can be used with a i386 PAE or x86_64 hypervisor. The sysutils/xenkernel3 and sysutils/xenkernel33 packages for i386 both provide i386 PAE hypervisor kernels.

2007-12-15:   NetBSD/xen Howto updated

The NetBSD/xen Howto has been updated with some details about Xen on amd64.

2007-12-14:   NetBSD runs on Xen/amd64

NetBSD current now includes amd64 kernels that will run on top of the x86_64 Xen hypervisor. NetBSD/amd64 can run as both domain 0 and domU, and supports the same features as i386 (including HVM support if the hardware supports it), and in addition can run 32bit guests which uses the PAE extensions.

2006-10-20:   update to 3.0.3 and HVM support

Manuel Bouyer announced in a message to the port-xen mailing list that the xentools30 and xenkernel30 packages have been updated to the just-released Xen-3.0.3. A new package, xentools30-hvm, has been committed to pkgsrc-current. It provides the additional tools needed to run unmodified guests under a NetBSD domain0, using Intel VT-x or AMD SVM virtualization extensions. NetBSD, Linux and Windows XP have been successfully booted in a Xen HVM domain.

2006-07-04:   New port maintainer

After Manuel Bouyer had already taken over most of the tasks of a port maintainer, due to Christian Limpach's lack of time, he is now the official maintainer of NetBSD/xen.

2006-07-03:   NetBSD as Domain0 for Xen3

Manuel Bouyer announced in a message to the port-xen mailing list that NetBSD is finally usable as a Domain0 with version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor.

2006-04-07:   Xen-3 support pulled up to netbsd-3

Manuel Bouyer pulled the Xen-3 domU support to the netbsd-3 branch. For dom0 support, you'll have to run -current or wait for NetBSD 4.0.

2006-03-22:   Xen3 domU is now functional

Manuel Bouyer has continued his work on getting NetBSD to work on Version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor over the past few weeks and NetBSD should now be functional on Xen3 [unprivileged domains] with block and network devices.

2005-03-13:   Xen 2.0 Howto

A short Xen 2.0 Howto has been made available.

2005-03-10:   Xen 2.0 support

Manuel Bouyer has just merged the bouyer-xen2 branch into NetBSD -current; this means that support for Xen 2.0 (both in privileged and unprivileged mode) will be available in NetBSD 3.0. Support for Xen 1.2 has been removed.