xen(4)

xen4

Xen domu nexus device

Usage

xen0 at pvbus?

Overview

xen driver performs HVM domU guest initialization, provides abstraction for virtual Xen interrupts, access to the XenStore configuration storage as well as a device probing facility for paravirtualized devices such as disk and network interfaces.

When running under XenServer, to let the host know that the guest has finished initializing and to allow graceful shutdown, set the following XenStore properties with hostctl(8) in rc.local(8):

ostype=$(sysctl -n kern.ostype)
osrelease=$(sysctl -n kern.osrelease)
# XenServer Tools version
hostctl attr/PVAddons/MajorVersion 6
hostctl attr/PVAddons/MinorVersion 2
hostctl attr/PVAddons/MicroVersion 0
hostctl attr/PVAddons/BuildVersion 76888
hostctl attr/PVAddons/Installed 1
# OS version
hostctl data/os_name "$ostype $osrelease"
hostctl data/os_uname $osrelease
hostctl data/os_distro $ostype
# Inform Xen of IPs bound to the VM
hostctl attr/vif/0/ipv4/0 192.0.2.1
hostctl attr/vif/0/ipv6/0 2001:db8::1
# Update XenStore
hostctl data/updated 1

Releases

23 releases since OpenBSD 5.9; the text changed 2 times.

  1. 5.9–6.1
  2. 6.2–7.0
  3. 7.1–8.0

History

The xen driver first appeared in OpenBSD 5.9.

Authors

The xen driver was written by Mike Belopuhov ⟨[email protected]⟩ from scratch, inspired by the FreeBSD implementation.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.