Fun with NetBSD 5 and Xen

One-line summary: It works very well, provided the hardware cooperates.

I have been smoothly running FreeBSD and Linux on an inexpensive setup based on a low-wattage dual-core AMD X2 (45w, 2.3GHz, 2x512k L2) plugged into a Foxconn A7DA-S motherboard, Corsair memory, stuffed into an Antec case with a 350W power supply. The Foxconn is a nice little board, using the AMD 790GX northbridge and supports 8GB of RAM. However, the ACPI gives various operating systems problems and the Broadcom chipset for the on-board GigE interface is not supported under the releases versions of FreeBSD7 and NetBSD 5. Various problems with interrupts and register mappings manifest themselves. I worked around these by selectively disabling features (on-board audio, lan, legacy USB, legacy IDE) but the combination varies with the OS. On NetBSD, despite being disabled in BIOS, the legacy USB support causes a panic due to mapping of the PS/2 keyboard port but this is fixed in -CURRENT. To get reliable networking on NetBSD it was necessary to swap my Intel i8255x-based NIC (fxp), which appeared to be solid for FreeBSD and Linux, for a DEC Tulip 21x4x-based one (tlp).