A simple matter of…

Well a bit of yesterday and most of yesterday resulted in my first

Well it turned out that disabling domain validation had a bad effect - the hard disks were being talked to at async SCSI speeds. So I bit the bullet and tried the 2.6.14 merge tree (the “stable” version rather than the “unstable” version). The config options have moved around (mainly that xen [...]

Fixed that problem. To explain what I did, just a little information about Xen. Your machine boots and runs a boot loader to pick what operating system to use. Most Linux boxes use “grub” these days. It’’s much more flexible and convenient than Lilo. Xen also won’t work with Lilo IIRC.
Grub [...]

I’ve

Hmm - Xen seems too be misbehaving on another box (SMP, SCSI disks).
Most kernels crash (looks like in the domain validation code of aic7xxxx), however I’ve compiled up a shiny new kernel and Xen doesn’t even seem to be using it. I just get “Domain 0 shutdown”. I think it can’t boot the [...]

Well, just got Xen 3 compiled up nicely with my old kernel config and ndiswrapper. I had to disable kprobes and config_pci_mdi due to undefined symbols (stuff which is in x86 but not xen architecture).
Had to patch update-grub along the way which I’ll be sending off to fix the worst cases (ignore symlinks). [...]

It’s official.
As of 5th November I’m now old (30).
Boo hoo

Now I’ve had a little time to finish investigating, I’ve confirmed a misunderstanding between Debian’s initramfs and the kernel - one talks hexadecimal, the other talks decimal (the kernel). So I’ve changed the scripts to talk decimal and life works wonderfully.