Fun with NetBSD 5 and Xen
Oct 12, 2009One-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
).