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

2012-02-25:   domU SMP support complete

The NetBSD fundation started the Xen MP project 8 month ago; the goal was to add SMP support to NetBSD/Xen domU kernels. This project has officially completed, and after a few bug fixes in the pmap(9) code it is now considered stable on both i386 and amd64. NetBSD 6.0 will ship with option MULTIPROCESSOR enabled by default for Xen domU kernels.

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.