Al, I have a friend who recently worked at Rackspace. Here is what he said, just in case it helps (I forwarded your original question to him):
Swift's Pal Says: > I'm sure it's possible to get the netbsd kernel/basic userland running > echo 'hello world' to the console, seeing as the virtual machine gives > you direct access to a virtual block device. But Even then I'm not 100% > sure it'd work because Rackspace uses a lot of custom PV drivers in its > xen implementation. E.g. there's a "supervisor domain" on each xenserver > that notifies an API when a customer dom's 'nova-agent' has started. > They do this over the xenbus. NetBSD won't have that in a vanilla build, > so in the rackspace console you'd see a vm in 'unknown' status; you > can't even see the console when it's in this state. > TL;DR: Rackspace makes sure that the linuxes they support can boot and > be controlled by all their special services - they didn't design wide, > just deep." Perhaps this doesn't apply to you if you are renting a "real" server at Rackspace instead of renting a virtualized guest. YMMV. -Swift