kvm hangs when rebooting a guest VM

kvm hangs when rebooting a guest VM

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Hello,

I have a small but annoying issue.

Host:
* AMD Athlon64
* Debian Lenny, Kernel 2.6.26-1-amd64
* kvm-72 (Debian package) or kvm-76 (self-built)

Guest:
* monolithic vanilla 2.6.26, KVM_GUEST and KVM_CLOCK, VIRTIO for both
  block device and NIC
* various Debian and Ubuntu versions

I don't use any libvirt or similar things, I start the VMs by directly
calling kvm in a script. I directly specify the kernel and it's options
with the -kernel and -append parameters.

Problem:
Shutting down a VM from inside it (shutdown -h now) works just fine.

Will now halt.
[171368.812319] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S5
[171368.816964] Power down.
[171368.820177] acpi_power_off called

then the kvm process exits. However, restarting the VM (reboot) does not
work ...

Will now restart.
[   37.088270] Restarting system.
[   37.089775] machine restart

this is where the KVM process hangs in a loop and uses 100% CPU on the
host. I can still kill it (Ctrl-A x) or change to it's console, but
system_restart doesn't seem to work there either.

iggy suggested to use an extboot.bin from an earlier kvm version (I used
kvm-60), didn't change.

Any idea what could be wrong here?

Regards,
Bernhard

Re: kvm hangs when rebooting a guest VM

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Bernhard Schmidt <berni@birkenwald.de> wrote:

> I have a small but annoying issue.
>
> Host:
> * AMD Athlon64
> * Debian Lenny, Kernel 2.6.26-1-amd64
> * kvm-72 (Debian package) or kvm-76 (self-built)
>
> Guest:
> * monolithic vanilla 2.6.26, KVM_GUEST and KVM_CLOCK, VIRTIO for both
>   block device and NIC
> * various Debian and Ubuntu versions
>
> I don't use any libvirt or similar things, I start the VMs by directly
> calling kvm in a script. I directly specify the kernel and it's options
> with the -kernel and -append parameters.
>
> Problem:
> Shutting down a VM from inside it (shutdown -h now) works just fine.
>
> Will now halt.
> [171368.812319] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S5
> [171368.816964] Power down.
> [171368.820177] acpi_power_off called
>
> then the kvm process exits. However, restarting the VM (reboot) does not
> work ...
>
> Will now restart.
> [   37.088270] Restarting system.
> [   37.089775] machine restart
>
> this is where the KVM process hangs in a loop and uses 100% CPU on the
> host. I can still kill it (Ctrl-A x) or change to it's console, but
> system_restart doesn't seem to work there either.
>
> iggy suggested to use an extboot.bin from an earlier kvm version (I used
> kvm-60), didn't change.
>
> Any idea what could be wrong here?

Noone with an idea here? I've upgraded to kvm-77 and Linux 2.6.27 for
both host and guest in the meantime (and moved from an AMD AM2-box to an
Intel Dualcore Xeon platform), still no change.

Bernhard