[fedora-arm] More issues with F17 Versatile Express in QEMU

[Eric Smith]

A few days ago I mentioned that I can't get the F17 XFCE Versatile 
Express image to work properly in QEMU; it puts up a GUI "Oh no! 
Something has gone wrong." message.

I've been trying to use the non-GUI version instead, and having bad luck 
with that too.  It boots fine, and I can log in.  The first thing I need 
to do is a yum install of various packages.  I've been successful doing 
a yum install once, but usually it fails.  When it does, it downloads a 
bunch of stuff, sometimes finishes the download and starts installing, 
but eventually bogs down and nothing happens for hours.  When this 
happens, what I see is that the mmcqd/0 process is using 96-100% of the 
CPU, continuously, while the yum process is apparently waiting for disk 
activity to complete.

In one instance, after about an hour yum reported "Error: database disk 
image is malformed".  In all other cases, I've waited for multiple hours 
with no progress.

After each attempt I have started from a fresh disk image, to ensure 
that I'm not getting this due to having corrupted the image in a 
previous attempt.

I did verify that the date and time in the emulation are correct.

The host machine is running F17 x86_64 on an AMD Athlon II X3 450 with 
16GB of RAM.  I was using an older F17 x86_64 kernel on the host, but 
have tried with the latest 3.6.2-4 with the same results. I'm using 
qemu-system-arm-1.0.1-2.  The F17 ARM kernel and disk image were 
downloaded using the links on the Fedora ARM wiki page. The kernel is 
3.4.2-3.

I am reasonably certain that this is not a hardware issue with the host 
system because I use it extensively for software development both 
natively and using Fedora and Windows in VMware Workstation, with no 
issues.  (I did not have VMware workstation running during any of the 
attempts at using qemu.)

Has anyone seen similar issues?

Is anyone actually using Fedora ARM in qemu successfully for anything 
non-trivial?

I'd buy a Trimslice or something to use instead, but unfortunately don't 
have any budget for it at the moment.  If anyone is willing to offer ssh 
access into a working Fedora ARM system that I could use temporarily for 
development, that would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Eric