On Wed, 2016-10-05 at 15:00 +0100, Andrei Perietanu wrote:
Hi Andrea, Thanks for the reply; To shed some more light on the matter I performed a few more tests; each time doing a clean install. I installed ubuntu14.04 as the guest OS, keeping everything else the same. On my custom Linux I've created ubuntu VMs before (using ide drivers) and it all works file. This time I created the VM using virtio disk drivers and the installation didn't even finish. It reported a disk related error saying it's not being able to read from /dev/vda. I restarted the machine...same error.
Okay, that makes more sense :) If the OS installer can access the disk, the installed OS should as well - or at the very least it should be possible to configure it to do so, eg. by including the relevant kernel modules in the initramfs.
Just to make sure that I have not messed anything up, I did the same on the ubuntu host, so installed ubuntu guest on an ubuntu host uding the same guest config xml. This time everything worked fine. So it looks like a problem with the kvm virtio drivers. I was trying to stay away from updating the qemu package because adding the package takes a long time (usually, because of missing dependencies), but I'm not sure I have any other option at this point...
You should really try taking one of the Ubuntu-on-virtio guests that you managed to create successfully on the Ubuntu host and copying it over to the custom Linux host (guest configuration + qcow2 disk image) to see whether it can boot. Failing that I guess upgrading QEMU is your best bet. -- Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization