opensuse hvm under fc6?

[Tom Horsley]

I've been happily installing hvm's under fedora core 6 (x86_64),
and then I got to opensuse 10.2 (also x86_64). When I try pointing
virt-manager at the DVD image and installing with a big file
for a virtual disk, the VM crashes almost immediately.

Anyone seen this?

It is just the blasphemy detector that triggers it? :-).

(Though sles10 installed OK, it is just opensuse with the problem).

I get the same thing when I try the "mini" ISO for a network
install.

[Gerd Hoffmann]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> I've been happily installing hvm's under fedora core 6 (x86_64),
> and then I got to opensuse 10.2 (also x86_64). When I try pointing
> virt-manager at the DVD image and installing with a big file
> for a virtual disk, the VM crashes almost immediately.
>
> Anyone seen this?
>
> It is just the blasphemy detector that triggers it? :-).

No, it also happens when installing suse on suse ;)

Problem is the graphical boot loader, it exercises some real-mode tricks 
which work on real hardware but not in the vt real-mode emulation.

While one can argue it is xen bug sles10 got a workaround nevertheless, 
it detects xen somehow and doesn't use the grapical screen then.  For 
some obscure reason that patch didn't made it into opensuse 10.2 ...

Ok, what you can do:

(1) Try hold down shift at boot, that should turn off the graphical
     bootloader screen too.  Might be difficult as the window almost
     instantly disappears ...
(2) Grab kernel and initrd from boot/$arch/loader and boot them somehow
     (not involving a graphical bootloader ...)
(3) Do a paravirtual install instead
     (http://et.redhat.com/~kraxel/xen/suse-guest.html)
(4) Get an AMD machine (SVM has real-mode support for VMs in hardware
     and unlike VT don't suffer from incomplete-real-mode-emulation
     issues).

Oh, and btw: same story for kvm installs ...

HTH,
   Gerd

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:09:24 +0200
Gerd Hoffmann  wrote:
> (2) Grab kernel and initrd from boot/$arch/loader and boot them somehow
>      (not involving a graphical bootloader ...)

Hey! That option worked great. I've been installing with files as
virtual disks, so I just made a copy of one of my other VM files,
mounted it with the device mapper voo-doo, copied the linux and initrd
to it, and diddled the grub config to boot them. When I started
that VM, there I was installing opensuse as an HVM.

Of course I had to remount the image and comment out the graphical
boot option in the menu.1st file it created to get it to reboot
initially, but it all seems to be working now.

Thanks for the info.