[CentOS-virt] SOLVED! Xen HVM domU won't start since updates to 2.6.18-164.15.1 kernels

Mon Apr 12 07:34:22 UTC 2010
Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 10:43:21PM -0400, Aaron Clark wrote:
> On 03/31/2010 11:50 PM, Aaron Clark wrote:
> >
> > I'm going to tinker with this for a bit to try and figure out what
> > difference from the previous config is actually the cause of the issue.
> > I just had the other, formerly working VM, bail with the same symptoms
> > once I got this one work. The workaround is nice but I definitely want
> > to isolate this bug now.
> >
> 
> I just wanted to follow up on this a bit. Once I got it going, the VM 
> ran for over 10 days without issues.  Tonight I started tinkering with 
> the Xen config to try an isolate whether it was acpi or apic causing 
> troubles.... the short answer is that neither is the problem.
> 
> What is the problem then?  It looks like a bug in virsh/libvirt; I'll 
> need some help to debug it though.  I'm using the following file for all 
> of this:
> name = "Belldandy"
> uuid = "b1f1d0a4-9687-947c-5eaf-b362d5d5a199"
> maxmem = 256
> memory = 256
> vcpus = 1
> builder = "hvm"
> kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
> boot = "c"
> pae = 1
> acpi = 1
> apic = 1
> on_poweroff = "destroy"
> on_reboot = "restart"
> on_crash = "restart"
> device_model = "/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
> disk = [ "phy:/dev/SystemsVG/Belldandy,hda,w" ]
> vif = [ "mac=00:16:3e:29:65:46,bridge=xenbr0,script=vif-bridge" ]
> vnc = 1
> 
> 
> 1. xm create -f ./Belldandy.xen  -- successfully starts as expected
> 2. Copy Belldandy.xen to /etc/xen/Belldandy, start with xm create 
> Belldandy -- successfully starts as expected
> 3. Attempt to start with virsh start Belldandy -- fails horribly with 
> the same 'no state' issue as before.
> 
> So I can work around this for now by not using virsh to start them up 
> but it's still quite annoying.  I should note that I can remotely access 
> that machine with VMM and it suffers the same issues but handles 
> everything else just fine once I manually start the domU via xm as above.
> 

Hmm.. interesting.

I guess the VM info (state) needs to be in the libvirt database before
you can 'virsh start' it? 

-- Pasi