Bug 470386

Summary:	virt-manager uses virtio disks where they won't necessarily work
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Bill Nottingham <notting>
Component:	python-virtinst	Assignee:	Daniel Berrangé <berrange>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	10	CC:	berrange, crobinso, hbrock, markmc, rvokal, virt-maint
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2009-10-05 14:26:31 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Bill Nottingham 2008-11-06 22:41:15 UTC

Description of problem:

virt-manager seems to default to using virtio disks.

Unfortunately, if you're installing Fedora 9 GA (or earlier), /dev/vd* aren't properly labelled by policy, so you can't mount them outside of the initrd unless you:

1) turn off SELinux
2) update to the policy from updates

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

virt-manager-0.6.0-3.fc10.x86_64

Comment 1 Bug Zapper 2008-11-26 04:55:50 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle.
Changing version to '10'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Comment 2 Cole Robinson 2008-12-07 04:10:23 UTC

Fix now upstream:

http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel?cs=82957a280825

Moving to POST.

Comment 3 Mark McLoughlin 2009-01-06 18:32:50 UTC

Okay, I've done some testing and there are a couple of issues with F9 virtio support:

  1) Once you've installed to /dev/vda and rebooted, /boot fails to mount
     with this:

       Mounting local filesystems:  mount: special device UUID=fc08d54b-47e3-4ff1-8000-d49766b38a41 does not exist [FAILED]

     So, e.g. if you then do a yum update the kernel doesn't get installed
     in the /boot partition

     This is because the selinux-policy fix for labelling /dev/vd* just
     missed GA. See bug #444468

  2) With very recent KVM (i.e. kvm-80 or later) and with GSO support enabled
     on a virtio NIC (which libvirt currently doesn't do), then the F9 guest
     will say that it supports the "mergeable receive buffers" feature when,
     in fact, it doesn't support it; the guest then crashes when it tries
     to use the NIC

so, yeah - better not to use virtio when installing F-9 - it *almost* works, so if you know what you're doing it's fine to just tell virt-install that you're installing F-10 and fixup problems manually post-install

Comment 4 Cole Robinson 2009-03-04 17:02:43 UTC

virtinst-0.400.2 is queued up for updates-testing.

Comment 5 Mark McLoughlin 2009-05-13 12:20:32 UTC

(In reply to comment #3)

>   2) With very recent KVM (i.e. kvm-80 or later) and with GSO support enabled
>      on a virtio NIC (which libvirt currently doesn't do), then the F9 guest
>      will say that it supports the "mergeable receive buffers" feature when,
>      in fact, it doesn't support it; the guest then crashes when it tries
>      to use the NIC

On a side note, latest qemu can handle guests with this bug because of this patch:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-04/msg00190.html

qemu-kvm-0.10.4-2.fc11 in F11 has workaround

Comment 6 Cole Robinson 2009-10-05 14:26:31 UTC

This is in virtinst-0.400.3 which is in F-10 stable. Closing.