[Qemu-discuss] Kernel panic when booting from SCSI disk

[Thomas Oberhammer]

The short version:

I'm trying to run a VMware image on qemu. Therefore I need to be able to attach 
the disks via SCSI interface in qemu.
Is there a possibility to do so?

Some background information:

The VMware image consists of 2 disks and has been successfully converted, so 
that I can boot it with qemu. I can attach the disks via IDE, but this causes 
that the image is not fully functional.

The problem comes from the fact, that the image originally was designed for 
VMware, and some part of its code relies on the condition as they are on 
VMware, e.g. that the disks are attached via SCSI interface and can therefore 
be found on /sys/class/scsi_device.
Or differently speaking, when I run the image, the disks are named hda & hdb, 
but the image requires them to be sda & sdb to provide the full functionality.

The image is linux based, the kernel version is 2.6.9. I am aware that the 
problem would vanish if this could be upgraded to 2.6.20 (since then both SCSI 
and IDE devices are named sda/sdb/...), but this is not possible.

The problem:

If I attach my disk with 

kvm --enable-kvm -m 1024 \
-drive file=disk1_converted-flat.vmdk,if=scsi,index=0,format=raw,boot=on \
-drive file=disk2_converted-flat.vmdk,if=scsi,index=1,format=raw \

I can initiate the boot process, but at some point I end up with the message

Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


But if I use

kvm --enable-kvm -m 1024 \
-boot c \ 
-drive file=image-disk1_converted-flat.vmdk,if=ide,index=0,format=raw \
-drive file=image-disk2_converted-flat.vmdk,if=ide,index=1,format=raw \

it works fine (at least concerning booting).

At the point when the first (i.e. SCSI) version crashes, the second (i.e. IDE) 
shows the following output:

EXT3-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended
EXT3 FS on hda5, internal journal
EXT3-fs: recovery complete.
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

-> it seems that the SCSI version crashes when it tries to mount the disks.

Does anyone have an idea, how this problem can be solved?

Please not that...
- the image cannot be modified
- the image has no virtio drivers installed

I am using QEMU Version 0.12.3, but I also tried 1.0.1 and it showed the same 
behaviour.