Re: [Xen-devel] HVM domains crash after upgrade from XEN 4.5.1 to 4.5.2

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 08:16:33PM +0100, Atom2 wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 16.11.15 um 16:31 schrieb Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk:
> >>>>Your analysis was absolutely spot on. After re-thinking this for a
> >>>>moment, I thought going down that route first would make a lot of sense
> >>>>as PV guests still do work and one of the differences to HVM domUs is
> >>>>that the former do _not_ require SeaBIOS. Looking at my log files of
> >>>>installed packages confirmed an upgrade from SeaBIOS 1.7.5 to 1.8.2 in
> >>>>the relevant timeframe which obviously had not made it to the hvmloader
> >>>>of xen-4.5.1 as I did not re-compile xen after the upgrade of SeaBIOS.
> >>>>
> >>>>So I re-compiled xen-4.5.1 (obviously now using the installed SeaBIOS
> >>>>1.8.2) and the same error as with xen-4.5.2 popped up - and that seemed
> >>>>to strongly indicate that there indeed might be an issue with SeaBIOS as
> >>>>this probably was the only variable that had changed from the original
> >>>>install of xen-4.5.1.
> >I recall seeing this way back in Fedora 20 days. I narrowed it down the
> >SeaBIOS version that was a standalone package to not have CONFIG_XEN.
> >
> >Having that fixed in the SeaBIOS package fixed it.
> Hi Konrad, Doug, Andrew (specifically added to this part of the thread)!
> Konrad, you might have found an interesting point. I did have a look at the
> ebuild for the failing version and in there I found the following comment:
> ====== comment from ebuild =======
>     # Upstream hasn't released a new binary.  We snipe ours from Fedora for
> now.
>     # http://code.coreboot.org/p/seabios/downloads/get/bios.bin-${PV}.gz
> ====== end comment from ebuild =======
> which might in fact underline that there might be an issue similar to what
> you described above.
> 
> What is also pretty interesting is the fact that the old (working) SeaBIOS
> version 1.7.5 installed as "bios.bin" under /usr/share/seabios is actually
> 262.144 bytes in size whereas the new (invalid) SeaBIOS 1.8.2 installed in
> the same location is only half as big: 131.072 bytes.
> 
> I checked at the download site and the 1.8.2 binary version is indeed not
> available from http://code.coreboot.org/p/seabios/downloads/. But both the
> binary versions for 1.7.5 and 1.8.0 are available and both are acutually
> 262.144 bytes in size, so I'd be very surprised if the 1.8.2 version is
> really only half that size. By the way, the old working version (according
> to the ebuild) was directly downloaded from the above url and also shows an
> identical SHA1 digest to that version available for download there.

<blinks>I thought Gentoo was all about rebuilding from source and not
taking binary blobs.
> 
> To me this looks as if something is really wrong here. If anybody of you has
> access to a 1.8.2 version, could you please confirm whether there's really
> that big a size difference between the 1.7.5 and the 1.8.2 versions? Or is
> that difference probably attributable to the missing CONFIG_XEN option?

It may be other options too - like CONFIG_XHCI, or a huge amount of other
ones.
> 
> Andrew: I havent't gotten around to run the debug version of the hypervisor
> again, but if the current suspicion turns out to be true, there's probably
> not much value in that anyways. Would you agree?

I am not Andrew and can't really speak for him, but I am going to take a 
leap here and say he will agree with you.

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