[Xen-devel] playing with various fully virtualized 32b/64b guests - a Summary

[Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

during the last weeks I played a bit with various (unmodified) 32 and 64
bit Guests on a 64bit hypervisor (xen-unstable).

The following a summary of my findings.

*) Windows XP - 32b installs and runs fine (using pcnet) - seems to be
stable even under moderate load

*) OpenBSD 3.9/i386 - 32b installs and runs with ne2000 but not with
pcnet/amd. while a bit slow it seems to be stable and completes a full
make build without any issues.
The kernel logs a lot of:

ne3: length does not match next packet pointer
ne3: len fa2e nlen 1a2e start 4c first 5c curr 5e next 43 stop 80
ne3: NIC memory corrupt - invalid packet length 6702

under moderate network load.

*) Windows XP64 - 64bit - loads up the installer (requires acpi=1 and
apic=1) completes the initial hardware detection but the domain crashes
as soon as the text installer tries to start up the graphical installer.

*) OpenBSD 3.9/AMD64 - 64bit. Starts up the bootloader crashes qemu-dm
as soon as it tries to boot the kernel:

qemu-dm[5117]: segfault at 00002ab60f896008 rip 00002ab5efa21040 rsp
00007fffffcb8f48 error 4

*) Solaris10/x86_64 - 64bit - fires up the initial installer screen but
dies as soon as the installer tries to boot the kernel:

Booting from CD-Rom...
int13_harddisk: function 41, unmapped device for ELDL=81
int13_harddisk: function 08, unmapped device for ELDL=81
*** int 15h function AX=00C0, BX=0000 not yet supported!
Invalid %cs=0x660C for protected mode

Halt called from %eip 0xD2FFA


*) Linux Debian-Sid/AMD64 - 64bit - installs and runs fine though rather
slow

*) FreeBSD 6.1RC1/AMD64 - 64bit installer crashes very early in realmode:

Trap (0x6) while in real mode
eax       50000 ecx           0 edx           0 ebx         600
esp       D6A54 ebp           0 esi        1FB4 edi        2240
eip           3 eflags    33006 cs           28 ds            0
es            0 fs            0 uss          30 uesp       FFE6
ves          30 vds          30 vfs           0 vgs           0
trapno        6 errno         0
cr0       50032 cr2           0 cr3           0 cr4         651
Halt called from %eip 0xD0382

*) NetBSD 3.0/AMD64 - installer crashes very early in real-mode



To sum that up - the only unmodified 64bit guest I could get to work is
Linux neither FreeBSD, nor OpenBSD,NetBSD, Solaris or Windows XP64 do
work as a unmodified 64bit guest yet.
For 32bit guests I only managed to get WindowsXP,Linux  and OpenBSD/i386
to work - the rest of the BSDs at least seems to be blocked by real-mode
emulation issues in vmxassist.
All in all this results are a bit disappointing - since for now
"unmodified guests supported" really means more of "yeah Linux and 32b
Windows works".



Stefan

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