[Qemu-devel] SPARC Solaris 8: i386 guest - frequent hangs (cross-post)

[Shaddy Baddah]

Hi,

This is a cross-post from 
http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?p=10639#10639.

Continuing on from http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?p=10487#10487, 
I am being continually frustrated in bringing up my Debian i386 
installation on my external USB drive.

I have tried both the 0.8.2 version from the opensolaris.org project, my 
build of 0.9.0 and my build of latest CVS (as at this email) plus my 
earlier emailed patch. I am now running them with this command line (the 
no networking bit is to try to simplify the setup, and avoid the 
hangs... doesn't work though):

*Code:*
qemu -m 128 -hda /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0s0 -net none -nographic



Basically, at random points, qemu hangs completely. The confirmation of 
this is, also at random points, I'm sending a ctrl-a h to output the 
command help onto the console.

*Code:*

C-a h    print this help
C-a x    exit emulator
C-a s    save disk data back to file (if -snapshot)
C-a b    send break (magic sysrq)
C-a t    toggle console timestamps
C-a c    switch between console and monitor
C-a C-a  send C-a



When the hang occurs, I get no response from inputting this key sequence.

In fact, there is obviously never a *read* call being made, because 
after I manually kill the process from another terminal session, the 
buffered inputs are being unbuffered to the shell prompt.

The most interesting hang I had was, after booting single user, and then 
issuing a shutdown -h now, the hang occurred after the Linux kernel 
outputting:

*Code:*
Power down.



I checked the message log, and there are no apparent USB IO errors.

By the way, this is all aside from the seemingly much reported general 
slowness of the virtual machine. It's not nice, but I don't mind it if 
the VM is at least stable. As it stands now, I can't risk using it, as 
fsck has to sort out the mess after every hang.

Any help on the matter (like how I can diagnose the problem) will be 
greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Shaddy