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

[Soeren Grunewald]

Hi All,

Maybe it is a combination of libvirt and qemu. I had an similar issue as 
i made the update on F14. I installed the libvirt packages for F14 from 
ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/ and i could no boot the vm's as well. I 
traced this done to the generated qemu command for the disk. For drives 
using virtio this disk (if=none) arguments were not generated as expected.

e.g.
 > -drive 
file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/winxp.img,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-0,format=raw,cache=writeback

in previous version it generated the argument as "..,if=virtio,..". I 
tested this by manually executing the command-line.

i solved this issue by updating qemu to version 0.15 which apparently 
does not need "if=virtio" and can life with "if=none".
--
Regards
Soeren


On 09/28/2011 04:39 PM, 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.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ruben
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