Re: Converting PV to HVM - boot methods

On Thu, 24 Apr 2025, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2025, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 05:25:14PM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>>> On Thu, 24 Apr 2025, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 03:06:53PM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>>>>> I've set this to port-i386 rather than port-xen as it's more about the 
>>>>> x86
>>>>> boot process rather than Xen.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I have a (large) number of PV Xen VMs. These were created from a disk 
>>>>> image
>>>>> built with makefs that the sets were extracted into. This means there is 
>>>>> no
>>>>> partitioning except for disklabel and the root partition begins at 
>>>>> sector 0:
>>>>> 
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> This all works fine, but I'm interested in others' alternatives 
>>>>> suggestions.
>>>> 
>>>> If you're running netbsd-10 you should be able to boot PVH the same way 
>>>> you
>>>> boot PV; just replace the XEN3_DOMU kernel with GENERIC
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately not, you snipped out this bit:
>>> 
>>>> Now that XenServer and XCP-ng no longer support PV booting (and
>>>> PV-in-PVH doesn't work either) [...]
>>> 
>>> I would love to use PVH as it works brilliantly with the xl toolstck, but
>>> it's not an option with XenServer or XCP-ng.
>> 
>> That PV-in-PVH doesn't work doesn't imply that PVH isn't working ...
>
> PVH simply isn't an option. The options for domain-type are only pv and hvm. 
> On the very latest XenServer/XCP-ng, pv-in-pvh is an additional option which 
> is the equivalent of pvshim:
>
> https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/10633/status-of-pvh

As I've added to the above thread, the xl toolstack is still available on 
XenServer, so I was able to test PVH and PV-in-PVH (pvshim) and they both 
worked. However, this makes the VM's invisible to XenServer, so is not 
really an option. It does show that with a little work, xapi should be 
able to support them both though.

-- 
Stephen