[Xen-users] How much is involved in porting a new OS to Xen full virtualizaiton?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm looking at SCO OpenServer 5.0.6, for various reasons. I contacted 
Citrix, and they weren't interested in pursuing it as a new 
virtualization platform, so I'm stuck with VMware. But I'm finding 
VMware to be less snappy than I remember Xen being for other operating 
systems (and I've tried RHEL on both systems), and to have less graceful 
overall system tools for the server.
So, I'm thinking: what's involved in getting Xen to support a new OS for 
full virtualization? I've got a Dell server running RHEL 5.1 with plenty 
of disk and RAM, Intel chips with full virtualization turned on, it 
boots up from the installation CD and then hangs. This happens with 
RHEL's provided Xen software, the Xen 3.2 downloads, the commercial Xen 
server from Citrix, etc. So, what is involved in the debugging process 
for new guest OS's? Is there any estimate of how painful it would be to do?
SCO Openserver is running fine under VMware Workstation, telling it to 
use IDE disks instead of the driver complexity to use SCSI. So I assume 
that in theory, Xen could support a similar configuration, and get me 
away from the VMware bugs of refusing to admit that the image is being 
installed on another partition and the available space is from *THAT* 
partition, not my / partition. And the VMware init scripts don't handle 
auto-starting your multiple virtual images well except from a VNC, which 
I consider to be iinsane.
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