Xen is intended to be run on server-class machines, and the current
list of supported hardware very much reflects this, avoiding the need
-for us to write drivers for "legacy" hardware. Certain desktop chipsets
-such as nvidia nforce2 are not fully supported. Some can be made
-to work by specifying 'noacpi' or 'ignorebiostables' when booting Xen.
+for us to write drivers for "legacy" hardware. It is likely that some
+desktop chipsets will fail to work properly with the default Xen
+configuration: specifying 'noacpi' or 'ignorebiostables' when booting
+Xen may help in these cases.
Xen requires a "P6" or newer processor (e.g. Pentium Pro, Celeron,
Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, Xeon, AMD Athlon, AMD Duron).
If you have problems booting Xen, there are a number of boot parameters
that may be able to help diagnose problems:
- ignorebiostables Disable parsing of BIOS-supplied tables. This is needed
- for some very unsupported chipsets (eg. nforce2). If you
- specify this option then ACPI tables are also ignored, and
- SMP suppirt is disabled.
+ ignorebiostables Disable parsing of BIOS-supplied tables. This may
+ help with some chipsets that aren't fully supported
+ by Xen. If you specify this option then ACPI tables are
+ also ignored, and SMP support is disabled.
nosmp Disable SMP support.
This option is implied by 'ignorebiostables'.