STOP error with virtio on KVM-79/2.6.18/Win2k3 x64 guest

STOP error with virtio on KVM-79/2.6.18/Win2k3 x64 guest

[Adrian Schmitz]

Sorry for the repost.. I forgot the subject line!
Hi, I'm having problems with STOP errors (0x000000d1) under
KVM-79/2.6.18 whenever I try to use the virtio drivers. This post
(http://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=121089259211638&w=2) describes the issue
exactly, except that I'm using a Win2k3 x64 guest with the x64
paravirtual drivers instead of 32-bit guest/drivers. I am able to
reproduce the problem reliably using iperf, the same as in the above
post. When I disable virtio, the guest is very stable. Any suggestions
are greatly appreciated.

-Adrian

Re: STOP error with virtio on KVM-79/2.6.18/Win2k3 x64 guest

[Dor Laor]

Adrian Schmitz wrote:
> Sorry for the repost.. I forgot the subject line!
> Hi, I'm having problems with STOP errors (0x000000d1) under
> KVM-79/2.6.18 whenever I try to use the virtio drivers. This post
> (http://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=121089259211638&w=2) describes the issue
> exactly, except that I'm using a Win2k3 x64 guest with the x64
> paravirtual drivers instead of 32-bit guest/drivers. I am able to
> reproduce the problem reliably using iperf, the same as in the above
> post. When I disable virtio, the guest is very stable. Any suggestions
> are greatly appreciated.
>
>   
What driver version are you using? Version 2 is obsolete.
I posted ver 3 few months ago, Avi can you please upload it to sourceforge.
My old public space was blocked so I'll send you a private attachment to 
test.

Dor.
> -Adrian
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>   

RE: STOP error with virtio on KVM-79/2.6.18/Win2k3 x64 guest

[Adrian Schmitz]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dor Laor [mailto:dlaor@redhat.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 5:27 PM
> To: Adrian Schmitz
> Cc: kvm@vger.kernel.org; Avi Kivity
> Subject: Re: STOP error with virtio on KVM-79/2.6.18/Win2k3 x64 guest
> 
> What driver version are you using? Version 2 is obsolete.
> I posted ver 3 few months ago, Avi can you please upload it to
> sourceforge.
> My old public space was blocked so I'll send you a private attachment
> to
> test.
> 
> Dor.

Okay, I received the version 3 drivers and installed them on my guest.
This fixed the STOP errors. I can now run the same iperf tests without
any crashes. 

The only problem I have now is that the virtio seems to be slower for me
than e1000. Running iperf between the guest machine and the bridge
interface on the host using the e1000 driver consistently gave
measurements of around 320 Mb/s. With the new virtio drivers, I'm
getting roughly 120 Mb/s. I'm not sure if I'm missing something simple.

I tried changing the connection rate setting in the guest from the
default 100M to 1G, but that didn't seem to help. I also tried using a
tcp window size of 16k instead of the guest os default 8k, but that
didn't make much of a difference, either. Below is some information
about my setup. Please let me know if there's any other info I can
provide, and thanks again for your help.

Host Dist:		CentOS 5.2
Host Kernel:	2.6.18
Host Hardware:	Dual AMD Quad-Core, 8G memory
KVM Version: 	79 (modules and tools built and installed from source)
Guest OS:		Windows 2003 Server x64 SP2 (with all critical
updates)
Guest VCPUs: 	2
Guest memory:	4G
KVM command used: /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc -m 4096 -smp 2 -name bth-host00
-uuid 84d941a5-126e-d001-6029-d7d434a7dad6 -monitor pty -localtime -boot
c -drive file=/dev/mapper/sys_bth-host00,if=ide,index=0,boot=on -drive
file=/isoimages/netkvm.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom,index=2 -net
nic,macaddr=00:16:3e:5d:a7:46,vlan=0,model=virtio -net
tap,fd=19,script=,vlan=0,ifname=vnet1 -serial none -parallel none -usb
-usbdevice tablet -vnc 127.0.0.1:1