On Mon, 2015-01-19 at 13:22 +0100, Atom2 wrote:
Hi guys,
After updating to the latest version of xen 4.3.3 on gentoo (from
4.3.3-r2 to 4.3.3-r3) I am unable to start two of my previously
flawlessyly working freebsd HVM domUs; a third one is still working fine
(that's the pfsense domU which is based on freebsd as well).
Upon investigation it turned out that the working freebsd (pfsense) domU
uses MBR for the disk partition schema wheras the two other domUs use
GPT partitioned disks.
Both non-working domUs simply hang (but consume CPU cycles) and don't
start any part of the BSD bootloader. It appears as if the disk is not
found. The messages in the VNC screen are as follows:
====== VNC screen ======
SeaBIOS (version ?-20141222_100956-vm-host)
Press F12 for boot menu.
Booting from Hard Disk...
====== end VNC screen =======
On the (serial) console which is redirected to a GNU-screen session the
following information is displayed:
======= serial console ========
Parsing config from /etc/xen/auto/dc1
xc: info: VIRTUAL MEMORY ARRANGEMENT:
Loader: 0000000000100000->00000000001c1284
Modules: 0000000000000000->0000000000000000
TOTAL: 0000000000000000->000000007f800000
ENTRY ADDRESS: 0000000000100000
xc: info: PHYSICAL MEMORY ALLOCATION:
4KB PAGES: 0x0000000000000200
2MB PAGES: 0x00000000000003fb
1GB PAGES: 0x0000000000000000
Daemon running with PID 4653
======= end serial console ========
The setup for all three domU disks (the working and the two
non-woprking) is based on LVM and it's always the complete disk (i.e. no
partitions) that's being passed through to XEN. The only visible
difference is MBR versus GPT.
All freebsd installations on the LVM disks are o.k. and working because
I am able to fire-up the non-booting domUs by starting from a live CD
through XEN (passing through the live CD ISO file and changing the boot
order to D instead of C) by instructing the (then appearing) bootloader
to start the installed system from the disk instead of from the CD.
I wonder whether recently there have been any changes to the way (GPT)
disks are handled in SeaBIOS?
Since you've only bumped the Gentoo rev and are still using the same
base version of Xen whatever changes have been made would have been done
by the Gentoo maintainer between r2 and r3, not by xen project folks
(modulo the fac that the changes might be backports). You may want to
talk to them about this, or consult the gentoo changelog etc.
Ian.
