[fedora-virt] Guest can no longer be bootet with libvirt 0.9.6 from virt-preview repo

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 16:39 +0200, Ruben Kerkhof wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 16:12, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
> <dennisml at conversis.de> wrote:
> > On 09/28/2011 01:23 PM, Ruben Kerkhof wrote:
> >>
> >> Hey Dennis,
> >>
> >> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 16:20, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
> >> <dennisml at conversis.de>  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi,
> >>> I just noticed that once I upgrade to libvirt-0.9.6-1 from the
> >>> virt-preview
> >>> repo on my Fedora 15 machine I can no longer boot guests that use virtio
> >>> disks. I only get "Boot failed: could not read the boot disk".
> >>> Removing the disk and re-adding it as IDE drive allows KVM to boot from
> >>> the
> >>> disk (although the full boot obviously fails due to the hda/vda naming
> >>> difference but that's expected).
> >>>
> >>> After downgrading to libvirt-0.8.8-7 again the problem goes away and the
> >>> guest boot fine from virtio disks.
> >>>
> >>> Is this a known problem? Do I have to configure something differently to
> >>> make this work as it should?
> >>
> >> What version of Seabios are you using? I believe support for direct
> >> booting from virtio disks was added only recently.
> >
> > That can't be right. I've been using only virtio disks for years now and
> > never had any problem booting from them.
> > Also as I mentioned above it is upgrading/downgrading libvirt that
> > creates/fixes the issue. I don't touch the installed seabios package at all.
> >
> > Regards,
> >  Dennis
> 
> Somewhere around 0.9.4 libvirt switched to use a different method to
> indicate from which device to boot.
> See http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=c3068d4d2381146ed46051ad636a928edea5c602
> 
> I think this causes Seabios to skip using extboot.bin for booting and
> to try to directly boot from a disk.
> If your Seabios version is too old, it won't support booting from
> virtio disks directly.
> 
> Does adding <bootmenu enable='yes'/> to your xml help? If I'm right
> this will cause Seabios to fall back to using extboot.bin
> 
> This is all just a wild guess, but I'm having the same issue with scsi disks.

If you are using virt-preview, it is best to use all of virt-preview,
and not just cherry pick packages.  The version of seabios in
virt-preview is seabios-0.6.2-2 which matches what is currently in F16.

Justin