Bug 574463

Summary: i586 NET install Build0412 fails to boot on VirtualBox VM
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3 Reporter: Larry Finger <Larry.Finger>
Component: InstallationAssignee: Michal Seben <mseben>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity: Critical    
Priority: P5 - None CC: jsuchome, masterpatricko, novellbmw, snwint
Version: Milestone 3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: i586   
OS: openSUSE 11.3   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Larry Finger 2010-01-27 18:12:12 UTC
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 SUSE/3.5.6-1.1.1 Firefox/3.5.6

When booting the Build0412 i586 NET install CD on a Virtual Machine under VirtualBox 3.1.2, the boot hangs at the "Loading Basic Drivers" step. The md5 sum for the iso file is correct, and a CD burned from that file boots on a real machine.

The configuration of the VM is basic with 1024 MB RAM and standard hardware. The file openSUSE-KDE4-LiveCD-Build0412-i686.iso boots correctly on this VM.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1 Steffen Winterfeldt 2010-01-29 10:52:38 UTC
If at all this is a kernel issue.

BTW, on my machine it helps to turn on ioapic in VirtualBox.
Comment 2 Larry Finger 2010-01-29 16:57:50 UTC
That option makes no difference in this problem.
Comment 3 Michal Seben 2010-02-01 16:05:20 UTC
Hi Larry,
I don't have solution right now for you, but:

If you could enable hardware virtualization, please do it :
in vbox : Settings/System/Acceleration/ Enable VT-x/AMD-V 

if your have this checkbox grayed your cpu doesn't support hw virtualization
and then try to set "Base Memory" to 512MB and "Video memory" to 64MB

please post if this helps
Comment 4 Larry Finger 2010-02-01 16:40:06 UTC
My system already had the Enable VT-x/AMD-V option set. On/Off makes no difference.

I had started with 12MB video memory. Increasing to 64MB made no difference.

I started with 1024MB Base memory. When I reduced it to 512, the system booted. By bisecting, I found that 704MB works and 736MB fails.

The only other case I recall where too much memory was a problem involved more than 1024MB and a device that only had 30-bit DMA.
Comment 5 Larry Finger 2010-02-02 13:56:49 UTC
After setting 512MB RAM in the VM, I was able to complete a network upgrade of an 11.2 system.

If I set 1024M RAM with a mem=512M boot line, the CD fails in booting.
Comment 6 Bernhard Wiedemann 2010-02-27 04:42:40 UTC
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=576681 is probably a dup of this bug.
Comment 7 Vojtech Zeisek 2010-03-13 12:17:36 UTC
Yes, it is same as https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=576681 I pasted there more information about my configuration.
Comment 8 Larry Finger 2010-03-16 13:06:50 UTC
By using <HostKey>-F4, I found that the "Loading Basic Drivers" was hanging after loading ipv6.ko. By adding "ipv6.disable=1" to the boot line, booting proceeded normally even with RAM set at 1024 MB.
Comment 9 Tejas Guruswamy 2010-03-18 23:40:14 UTC
Confirmed that booting with ipv6.disable=1 results in a successful boot.

With this new information, while trawling I found this message on the lkml

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/10/84
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15042

There is some info requested on the (still open) bug that I don't quite understand, something about running nmi_watchdog ...

I still have no idea why this is specific to VirtualBox, or why the amount of memory is related to it, or why it only happens on some virtual machines.
Comment 10 Larry Finger 2010-03-19 05:32:06 UTC
The only relevance to nmi_watchdog is that vboxdrv turns off that watchdog when loading a VM. Perhaps a real machine and other kinds of VM work around a race condition through the use of the watchdog, but VB has this disabled. I'm grasping at straws here.

The first reference you quote above talks about a race between ipv6.ko loading/initializing and the starting of sshd. Does the kernel on the NET install iso actually start sshd? If so, perhaps a sleep 10 at the start of the sshd script would avoid the problem.

I checked the log while booting with 700 MB VM. In that case, the system does not try to load ipv6. There must be some kind of free RAM test that skips the load. Without IPV6, the load succeeds.
Comment 11 Michal Seben 2010-03-19 12:18:10 UTC
dup of bnc#576681

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 576681 ***