Upgrade to Maverick breaks KVM

I reproduced this bug on my home computer, in the sense that my guests didn't boot (XP). I haven't booted the old kernel though.

Oh, and I'm using a VMDK-image and it's stated as such in the machine's XML-file.

This seems related with this bug;

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qemu-kvm/+bug/666180

According to the Release Notes;

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes#Linux%20kernel%202.6.35

"With 10.10 we have also dropped support for i586 and lower processors, as well as i686 processors without cmov support. "

Could this be the culprit for us running virtual guests?

No change by updating to 2.6.35-23-generic-pae. The WinXP-guest doesn't boot. It just sits there with a black screen saying "Booting from Hard Disk..." and chewing 50% CPU constantly.

My Ubuntu 9.10 guest did boot up though. I'm upgrading the guest now, let's see if that breaks it or not.

I had a dormant guest Debian with kernel 2.6.26-2, this doesn't boot. CPU pegged on 50% all the time and the only thing visible on the console is "Booting the kernel".

Still trying to resolve this I installed the following packages manually;

kvm_84+dfsg-0ubuntu16+0.13.0+noroms+0ubuntu1_i386.deb
qemu-common_0.13.0+noroms-0ubuntu1_all.deb
qemu-kvm-extras_0.13.0+noroms-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
qemu-kvm_0.13.0+noroms-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
qemu_0.13.0+noroms-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

No change actually. My Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP guests boots from the disk and then just sits there eating CPU. Interestingly, my Windows 7 and ReactOS images did boot up. I even tried creating a new virtual guest, importing the ubuntu qcow2 existing disk-image to no avail. It just doesn't get past the "starting up.." message just after grub.

Booting the ubuntu-10.10 desktop ISO worked, and installing it too. The newly created ubuntu 10 install booted fine. Hmm, makes me wonder.

seabios pre-0.6.1

Converting the qcow2 image into a raw-image didn't help either.

Windows XP boots into safe mode, and safe mode with networking.

I tried installing the same kernel on my ubuntu-guest as in ubuntu 10.10, namely the linux-image-generic-pae. This didn't help either. I am unable to boot these guests.

I now re-installed the host with 10.10 64-bit, and now the guests boot OK.

My host was 64 bit to start with, and I still have similar problems..

I can confirm this bug. The only (minor) difference is that Windows XP hangs before the XP logo.

Trying to boot from the Windows XP SP2 CD gives me a BSOD ("Process1_Initialization_Failed" "STOP: 0x000006B"). I tried both linux-generic and linux-generic-pae (it's a 32-bit PC with 4G RAM).

When I transfer the disk image to my 64-bit server (also running up-to-date ubuntu 10.10) it works.

Does your WinXP kvm-guest boot if you boot up the previous kernel on the kvm-host? Mine did, and that's why i filed the bug as a kernel (config?) bug.

I cannot really test the older kernel. I had problems with hibernate/resume, gave uswsusp a try and that has completely screwed up my file system. So I have a fresh install of Maverick since Wednesday (and therefore no older kernels). The kvm problem appeared with the fresh install. I had successfully booted my Windows XP on the Maverick that I still had on Monday (which was a Maverick by updates, starting with 9.04 -- if I remember correctly). That's why I tested the linux-generic first (see above), because updating from 9.04 to Maverick never updated the kernel from linux-generic to linux-generic-pae.

Good news (for me): 10 minutes ago I succeeded in booting Windows XP again. I changed the <emulator> stanza in the libvirt configuration from "/usr/bin/kvm" to "/usr/bin/qemu-system-i386".

This bug report (LP 663191) was filed before 666180 but that duplicate (666180) is receiving more attention than this bug report (663191) so I'm not sure which one should be marked as a duplicate.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qemu-kvm/+bug/666180

Harald Hannelius, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better. Maverick reached EOL on April 10, 2012.
Please see this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We were wondering if this is still an issue in a supported release? If so, can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command in a supported release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text.

If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tag 'kernel-fixed-upstream'.

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the tag: 'kernel-bug-exists-upstream'.

If you are unable to test the mainline kernel, for example it will not boot, please add the tag: 'kernel-unable-to-test-upstream'.

Please let us know your results. Thanks in advance.

This is no longer an issue.