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Date:      Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:56:28 +0000 (UTC)
From:      Janne Snabb <snabb@epipe.com>
To:        Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
Cc:        freebsd-xen@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD-amd64 in Xen 4.0?
Message-ID:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.1101201411180.20212@tiktik.epipe.com>
In-Reply-To: <20110120131401.GA49672@cons.org>
References:  <20110119204707.GA50536@cons.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1101192327140.20212@tiktik.epipe.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1101200450270.20212@tiktik.epipe.com> <20110120131401.GA49672@cons.org>

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On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Martin Cracauer wrote:

> Just to be clear: the disk file has to be a whole disk, with
> partitions, right? hvmloader would then proceed through the regular
> bootloaders in the boot sector?

Short answer: yes.

Anything that should work on a real machine should work as the disk
image of a Xen HVM instance. The simplest way is to run the sysinstall
tool from an installation ISO that you attach to your virtual
machine. It will create MBR partition table and BSD disklabel for
you as well as install the required boot blocks/loaders.

You could alternatively do the same steps manually, using mdconfig
to attach your (empty) disk image file to an existing FreeBSD box
as a virtual disk and do the required steps with tools such as
fdisk, gpart, boot0cfg, disklabel, newfs, etc. and then move that
image file to your Xen machine.

You could also use a hard disk from an existing FreeBSD machine (a
real one), attach that disk to another machine (or boot from USB
stick) and read the whole hard disk image with dd or similar tool
and use that as the virtual disk for the Xen HVM instance.

--
Janne Snabb / EPIPE Communications
snabb@epipe.com - http://epipe.com/



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