Comment 0 for bug 857662

xenbus_probe_frontend is currently modular in several flavours, notably in the i386/generic-pae and amd64/server flavours which we use to build d-i Xen netboot images. The purpose of xenbus_probe_frontend appears to be to connect to the Xen bus and then emit uevents for any devices it finds there. Once it's loaded, autoloading for such things as xen-netfront works fine, allowing the guest to find its network interface. I believe that xen-blkfront works in a similar way.

However, with xenbus_probe_frontend modular, the early stages of the installer plus the early stages of normal system boot need to load xenbus_probe_frontend in order to find block and network devices. If we're going to do this, it seems as though we might as well just build xenbus_probe_frontend into the kernel. It seems to me that it should be pretty harmless on non-Xen systems, although of course somebody knowledgeable should verify that.

Right now, it's built in for the -virtual flavours, but that isn't set up such that we can build installer images from it, and I think I'm happier building those directly from -generic-pae / -generic anyway.

This is true in both Natty and Oneiric. If you can't do this for Oneiric and/or are unwilling to do this in a stable update for Natty, then please let me know so that I can add a workaround to the installer in time. Thanks!