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

[Thomas Werschlein]

For the records: switching from IDE to SATA disks solved our problem with extremely slow disk I/O running an OmniOS guest on KVM (Ubuntu 12.04). The libvirt snipplet looks like this now:

<disk type='block' device='disk'>
  [...]
  <target dev='sda' bus='sata'/>     <-- this used to be <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
</disk>

Now OmniOS boots within 5 secs! Many thanks to Eric Sproul, his reply (Dec 31 2012) to a post with subject "puzzling slow disk access" did bring us to the right path.

Thomas 


> 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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