[OmniOS-discuss] is it possible to run omnios inside a linux kvm virtual environment

[Thomas Werschlein]

Hi Naxto

Maybe I am chasing a similar problem. We experience extremely slow GRUB disk I/O (strace shows that reads are done in 512 byte chunks only) starting with qemu-kvm-1.0 (Ubuntu 12.04).

You can trace down the culprit by entering the GRUB shell upon boot and issue the GRUB commands manually:

bootfs rpool/ROOT/omnios
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS,disable-ehci=true,disable-uhci=true -v
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

In our environment, entering the last line above (loading the boot_archive) suddenly takes about 10 minutes! During that time you only see a blinking cursor.
Then you can issue "boot" and the startup process runs at normal speed. (BTW: the "disable-ehci=true,disable-uhci=true" options prevent the nagging "No SOF Interrupts have been received, this USB UHCI host controller is unusable." warnings. Has nothing to do with the problem at hand.)

We didn't experience this problem with qemu-kvm-0.12.3 (Ubuntu 10.04). And it turns out that the problem is not OmniOS specific either: we have the same issues with Solaris 11 (we are migrating from Sol11 to OmniOS right now).

To see what's going on during boot, you can comment the splashscreen, background and foreground directives in /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst (given, the system boots at all ...)

As a workaround we also converted the boot_archive from an UFS disk image to an ISO image, reducing the boot lag from 10 minutes to 2 minutes:

# install mkisofs
% pkg install cdrtools

# update-archive creates an ISO image, as soon as mkisofs is found in the PATH
% bootadm update-archive -v -f


Regards,
Thomas Werschlein


On 15.12.2012, at 15:05, Natxo Asenjo <natxo.asenjo at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi,
> 
> The installation went ok, but omnios hangs on boot. I see the splash
> image, but after 20 minutes nothing happens.
> 
> Can I see where it is hanging? In linux I can hit escape and see all
> kernel messages during boot time but this is apparently not working
> for me on this omnios stable virtual installation.
> 
> The kvm host is centos 6.3, this is a hp microserver n40l, granted,
> not the most powerful cpu around, but so far I have been able to run
> all the os I have tested (from linux to windows and freebsd).
> --
> Groeten,
> natxo
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