2.6.16 Guest Hangs on Boot

[Alec Joseph Rivera <eijhei@gmail.com>]

Hi all:

I'm Alec Joseph Rivera, from the Philippines and new on this list.
Anyway, I'm trying to run Lotus Foundations on kvm and it just hangs on
bootup. It stops right after:

  Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor
mode... Ok.

There's no more output after that. My invocation line is:

  $ qemu-kvm -cpu host -m 1G -cdrom lfs.iso

Adding -no-acpi allows the bootup to progress for a little bit then
hangs again with no further error messages after:

  PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xffe77, last bus=0
  PCI: Using configuration type 1

I tried adding kernel parameters like noapic, nolapic and pci=xxx but to
no avail. Adding -no-kvm allows somewhat normal operations but I/O
breakdowns after awhile. Kernel logs say something about dma timer
expiry. nolapic_timer on the kernel commandline seems to fix it. But no
one likes to settle with -no-kvm right :-)

I tried -no-kvm-irqchip and -no-kvm-pit separately, then together, but
they also don't have any effect. Still hangs after the WP bit checking
part.

I made some digging and found out that Foundations is actually based on
SLES 10 and uses a rather old 2.6.16 kernel. On kvm's changelog, kvm-47
already had added support for these kernels. Might this be a regression?

My host kernel is 2.6.35 and qemu-kvm is 0.12.5. modinfo kvm gives
nothing about the kvm version though..

Anyone got some suggestions I could try? BTW, kernel rebuilding is not
an option on Foundations :-(

Thanks.


Cheese!
Agi


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