Re: About usage of floppy with linux guests on gnome-boxes

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeenix gmail com>]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:27 AM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr redhat com> wrote:
> Hi,

  Hi Lucas,

> I maintain the test framework used on KVM [1][2], and we have an internal
> farm that runs regression tests on qemu, qemu-kvm and other KVM branches, so
> we are pretty up to date as for the latest issues found on those qemu
> branches :) We for example, were the first to report the recent qemu floppy
> regression to upstream. We have a good deal of code that automates and tests
> KVM, including installing a vast array of guest OS on an unattended way.

  Cool!

> Now, interested as I am in the boxes project,

  Awesome! Feels really good to get good contributors attracted already. :)

> checked out the code, and
> noticed that you guys are using floppy to do unattended install even on
> Linux. The problem with that is not related to qemu itself, but rather with
> the fact that the Linux on guests using floppy is pretty unstable. We have
> over a year of test results suggesting that it's ideal to avoid using the
> floppy hardware on Linux guests, since that can cause them to kernel panic.
> Granted, it's not reproducible 100% of the time, but I'd say a good 10% of
> the time floppy is being used, specially with -smp 2 guests, a kernel panic
> will happen, flooding the maintainers with bug reports, and it'd probably
> take a while for you guys to figure out what is going on.
>
> We've seen this with Fedora, OpenSUSE and RHEL so far, what made us to
> rewrite our unattended install code to use:
>
> 1) unattended cdrom + xml file for OpenSUSE/SUSE
> 2) unattended cdrom + kickstart file for Fedora/RHEL
> 3) initrd preseed (put a preseed file on initrd) for Ubuntu/Debian
>
> Windows guests do not present such problems, it's fine to use floppy for
> them (in fact, it's the best option since we can avoid re-mastering the
> windows cd).

  The first prototype code I wrote indeed created unattended CD-ROM
ISO but that method took quite some time and added also a lot to our
disk-usage. On further research and discussions with some relevant
developers, I found out that floppy method works for all OSs and
therefore implemented it. About floppy support being broken on Linux,
I was hoping to start using USB for Linux. Creating CD-ROM ISO is just
way too slow.

> So I'd like to implement unattended cdrom creation for gnome boxes,

  I'm sorry but I'll only want to go that route as the last resort
because of time and space concerns I mentioned above. How about you
try that USB method first?

> but I'm
> still making my way on vala *and* how to build it, so I can test my changes.
> I assume jhbuild is my best bet, or is there a shortcut that I can use (ie,
> installing packages foo, bar, baz and then I can build it)?

  At the moment, jhbuild is really your best bet. Best of luck!

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124