Booting ESXi from within KVM

Booting ESXi from within KVM

[Ian Kirk]

Having given up getting normal ESX booting from within KVM, I thought i'd
give ESXi a go.

PXE booting the hypervisor image outside of KVM I have working fine.

When trying within KVM i had a few issues:

The 'vmport' breaks ESXi, so for now I commented out vmport_init();

Then it complains about the CPU model_id, so I copy pasted it from my
host.

Now it gives an error that I don't quite understand:

No pages allocated to Node 0 -- big mismatch between BIOS and SRAT memory
maps, or MTRR error, or user removed all memory from a Node. Try checking
memory or upgrading BIOS.

I've tried removing some of the reported CPU capabilities (e.g. MTRR) from
qemu/target-i386/helper.c, but unsure if that makes any difference.

Command line:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -std-vga -boot n -net nic -net tap -curses -k en-gb -localtime

(Have tried a few including with/without ACPI)

I've hardcoded the model_id to be "AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core
Processor 3800+" (the host).

Using an (almost) up to date kvm-userspace.git and its kvm kernel.

How can I try to debug what ESXi is trying to ask for?

Re: Booting ESXi from within KVM

[Avi Kivity]

Ian Kirk wrote:
> Having given up getting normal ESX booting from within KVM, I thought i'd
> give ESXi a go.
>
> PXE booting the hypervisor image outside of KVM I have working fine.
>
> When trying within KVM i had a few issues:
>
> The 'vmport' breaks ESXi, so for now I commented out vmport_init();
>
> Then it complains about the CPU model_id, so I copy pasted it from my
> host.
>
> Now it gives an error that I don't quite understand:
>
> No pages allocated to Node 0 -- big mismatch between BIOS and SRAT memory
> maps, or MTRR error, or user removed all memory from a Node. Try checking
> memory or upgrading BIOS.
>
>   

Older kvm versions did not support mtrr properly.  what kvm are you running?



-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

Re: Booting ESXi from within KVM

[Ian Kirk]

Avi Kivity wrote:

> > No pages allocated to Node 0 -- big mismatch between BIOS and SRAT
> > memory maps, or MTRR error, or user removed all memory from a Node.
> > Try checking memory or upgrading BIOS.
>
> Older kvm versions did not support mtrr properly.  what kvm are you
> running?

Pretty much the latest git version for testing purposes.

I just re-tried with vanilla kvm-73, and after disabling vmport_init() and
hardcoding the CPU model_id I get the same error/problem.

Ian.