How install DilOS to a NetBSD Xen-4.6 Dom0

Owned by Roy Marples
Last updated: Apr 12, 2019
2 min read

Dilos-2.0.1.63 on a NetBSD Xen4.11 DOM0 works fine and this document is now purely historical.

You can install with 1G memory now as well.


This guide assumes you are already familiar with The XEN Project and describes how to work around an Illumos bug with newer versions of Xen where the old PV drivers fail to load correctly resulting in a system hang. Until this is fixed, it's possible to work around the problem by hard-setting the platform detected type to 0 which effectively disables the DilOS Xen PV drivers.

Step-by-step guide

  1. Allocate the disk space. I allocated 10 gig and after installation and some development packages I've got 14% space used.
  2. Allocate memory. You need around 3 gig for installation. Once installed you can reduce this to 1 gig - you could probably go as low as 512 but I've not tried.
  3. Configure a remote connection to the console. I used VNC to achieve this. If you use Windows, I recommend Tiger VNC.
  4. Fire up the guest and connect to it.
  5. STOP THE BOOT PROCESS BY PRESSING ESCAPE
  6. Enter boot -kvd
  7. Enter platform_type/w 0
  8. Enter :c
  9. Finish the installation process as normal.
  10. Shut down the guest and reconfigure it to boot off the new disk image and not the ISO.
  11. Follow Steps 4-8 again.
  12. Login as root and use nano to edit /etc/system
  13. Add set platform_type=0
  14. Save. You can now shutdown and startup the guest without interaction.


Sample config


name = 'dilos'
builder = 'hvm'
memory = 3078
vcpus = 2
serial = 'pty'
vif = [ 'mac=fa:00:00:00:00:01,bridge=bridge0' ]
boot = 'dc'
disk = [
        '/dev/mapper/vg0-dilos,,hda',
        '/images/dilos.iso,,hdc,cdrom'
]

vnc         = 1					# Setup a VNC server to connect to the console
vncdisplay  = 3					# Bind to port 5903
vnclisten   = "192.168.0.1"			# Dom0 IP address
vncpasswd   = ""				# you should set this