Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I've been trying out RHL6.2 [sic] on KVM 70.  This has an ancient
2.2.14 kernel and generally dates from 1999/2000.  However it does run
nicely in 16 MB of RAM which makes it useful for me because I want to
see what happens when we run 100s of KVM instances :-)

A few observations:

(1) IDE DMA seems to cause problems.  I get lost interrupts and
general disk problems unless I boot the kernel with ide=nodma.

(2) The kernel sees the default rtl8139 NIC but cannot seem to get any
packets out of it.  I had to switch to using ne2k_pci instead.

(3) Heavy console activity hangs the virtual machine.  This is a
really weird and very annoying bug.

  (a) Serial console (-serial stdio) _also_ hangs under heavy activity.

  (b) At the point when the kernel hangs, the EIP is always at the
    same place, seemingly in the __best_copy_from_user function in
    the guest kernel.

  (c) The KVM monitor is still responsive.

  (d) (Now the strange bit ..)  If I switch to the KVM monitor first
    and run my load tests - it doesn't hang!

  (e) However, qemu-kvm -nographic hangs under my load tests.

  (f) Plain qemu 0.9.1 doesn't hang.

Rich.

-- 
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Re: Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

[Avi Kivity]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I've been trying out RHL6.2 [sic] on KVM 70.  This has an ancient
> 2.2.14 kernel and generally dates from 1999/2000.  However it does run
> nicely in 16 MB of RAM which makes it useful for me because I want to
> see what happens when we run 100s of KVM instances :-)
>
>   

Can you post a pointer to an iso image somewhere?

-- 
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signature is too narrow to contain.

Re: Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 02:16:34PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> I've been trying out RHL6.2 [sic] on KVM 70.  This has an ancient
>> 2.2.14 kernel and generally dates from 1999/2000.  However it does run
>> nicely in 16 MB of RAM which makes it useful for me because I want to
>> see what happens when we run 100s of KVM instances :-)
>
> Can you post a pointer to an iso image somewhere?

I got it from this site, although it's often a little overloaded so
best to use 'wget' to grab the ISO.

http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/iso/i386/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top

Re: Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

[Arthur Enright]

Richard W.M. Jones <rjones <at> redhat.com> writes:

> 
> On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 02:16:34PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >> I've been trying out RHL6.2 [sic] on KVM 70.  This has an ancient
> >> 2.2.14 kernel and generally dates from 1999/2000.  However it does run
> >> nicely in 16 MB of RAM which makes it useful for me because I want to
> >> see what happens when we run 100s of KVM instances 
> >
> > Can you post a pointer to an iso image somewhere?
> 
> I got it from this site, although it's often a little overloaded so
> best to use 'wget' to grab the ISO.
> 
> http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/iso/i386/
> 
> Rich.
> 


I'm glad to have found this thread.  I was able to install RHL 6.2 using KVM but
I have a quick question.  I'm getting the interrupt errors mentioned at the
beginning of the thread during boot time.  I know I can append ide=nodma and
re-install grub once the instance is up, but it seems to be taking a ridiculous
amount of time to boot to a point where I can do this.

Is there a way to pass a kernel boot time option with LILO or do I just have to
wait until the box can come up?

I have tried:
linux ide=nodma
linux append="ide=nodma"

at boot but no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Art

Re: Has anyone tried to run Linux 2.2 under KVM?

[Arthur Enright]

Hey guys,

I was able to boot the instance with Knopix and add the append="ide=nodma" line
which got me up and running but the instance seems to lock up frequently.  I'm
wondering if there are some kvm tweaks I can make to stabilize the system.  Here
is what my qemu-kvm options look like:

/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -S -M rhel5.4.0 -cpu qemu32 -m 256 -smp \
1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -name RHL6 -uuid \
0be67ae0-2544-a356-05c0-1e3550681760 -monitor \
unix:/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/RHL6.monitor,server,nowait \
-no-kvm-pit-reinjection -no-acpi -boot c -drive \
file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/vm_lun_1 \
rhl6.img,if=ide,bus=0,unit=0,boot=on,format=raw -drive \
file=/media/redhat-.2- \
i386.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom,bus=1,unit=0, \
readonly=on,format=raw -net nic,macaddr=54:52:00:48:07:00, \
vlan=0,model=ne2k_pci -net tap,fd=23,vlan=0 -serial none \
-parallel none -usb -vnc 127.0.0.1:2 -k en-us \
-vga cirrus -balloon virtio

Thanks again!
-Arthur