hubertf's NetBSD Blog
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[20080909] Booting Xen without grub
So far, if you wanted to boot the Xen hypervisor, you had to use the GRUB bootloader. IIRC the reason for this was the different way of passing parameters to the kernel -- NetBSD's boot(8) doesn't use the "multiboot" protocol. This was added to the NetBSD kernel in order to boot NetBSD with grub, but that's not a help for Xen.

As installing a different bootloader is suboptimal, possibly dangerous, and has (had?) issues on 64bit platforms, grub was not such a nice option.

Now, Robert Swindells has finished making changes to NetBSD's native boot loader to allow it to load the Xen hypervisor by itself, without needing grub any more!

This makes installation of NetBSD/Xen even easier: Just drop in a Xen-enabled kernel, add an entry to the boot.cfg file, and reboot.

I can even envision that Xen could be installed in future versions of NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64 by default. Then all that's really needed would be to add the management tools after installing NetBSD. Any takers? :-)

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