[Qemu-devel] QEMU on x86_64: some feedback and questions

[Bruno Cornec <bruno@mondorescue.org>]

Hello,

I hope this kind of message is acceptable for this list.
[I'm not a subscriber yet, please keep my address in cc:]

I'm the developper of a project (http://www.mondorescue.org) where I
extensively use QEMU for generating all the packages I want to produce
for my application.

Up to now my home system was an i686 machine and I had 26 different VMs
to generate my sw for 26 different distros. All was fine, and kudos to
the dev team for that.

I recently changed for a Core2 Duo machine, and began to add 64 bits
virutal machines to the play. 

First point, all my 26 i386 VMs seem to still work fine.
For x86_64 VMs, the results are mixed:

Fully operational for fedora 6, mandriva 2007.0, 2007.1, rhel 4 and 5.

My rhel 3 x86_64 VM is unable to reboot correctly. When no special
parameter given to the kernel, it does 'Lost interrupts' after detecting
my hda IDE drive, and finishes by a kernel panic. If I add noapic
nolapic to the boot line, it goes further (without 'Lost interrupts'
mesages) but panics during ethernet card setup (acpi irq messages).

My debian 4.0 and suse 10.2 x86_64 VMs exhibit another issue. During
installation they block at grub-install and never go out - I left them
for hours with out sign of change. I tried to install grub manually
without more luck. And thus can't really finish the installation.

Let me know if I can provide you more precise details (or screenshots)
that could help you solve those issues, or if you have tests that you
want me to perform in order to diagnose the problem.

I already saw some similar reports (Cf:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=425648) but not any
track to solve them.

At least I hope the report is useful.
Thanks for a great tool and best regards,
Bruno.
-- 
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