Xen devel - Dec 2007 - OpenSUSE 10.3 HVM installer ATA difficulties

I''ve been trying to install OpenSUSE 10.3 as an HVM guest without much
success.  I''ve been using the mini network installation image
`openSUSE-10.3-GM-i386-mini.iso''.

First I had to binary-edit the iso to turn off gfxboot, which breaks
with current xen-unstable.  (In theory you can turn off gfxboot by
holding down shift but it is almost impossible to get the timing right
in practice.)  It''s easy to find the relevant place in the ISO -
search for `gfxboot'' and the isolinux config file will quickly turn
up.  You can replace `gfxboot '' with `#gfxboot'' and all will
be well.

Secondly I found I had to use stdvga rather than the more usual cirrus
emulation (because SUSE likes to use an X-based installer which
doesn''t work well, but if you give it stdvga it falls back to the much
more sensible text mode).  There are some quite bad display bugs when
using the cirrus emulation which I decided not to investigate.

Thirdly I encountered the stdvga memory save and restore bug which I
just sent a patch for, and the HVM timer bug which Dexan has just
tracked down.

And now I find that I''m having some kind of problem with the emulated
hard disk.  The OpenSUSE installer provides me with a shell prompt on
Ctrl-Alt-F2 in which dmesg shows many repetions of:
  ata2: DRQ=1 with device error, dev_stat 0x49
  ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
  ata2.00 cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x4a data 8 in
          res 41/50:03:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x3 (HSM violation)
  ata2: soft resetting link
  ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
  ata2: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
  ata2: EH complete
(copy-typed)

Meanwhile qemu-dm-7.log says:
  I/O request not ready: 0, ptr: 0, port: fed000f0, data: 70de7dc4, count: 1,
size: 4
  I/O request not ready: 3, ptr: 0, port: 376, data: 40, count: 1, size: 1

The guest kernel decided that the I/O errors on its filesystem were
too severe and passed EIO to rpm (called by yast).  (This happened at
95% progress through the installation, according to yast.)

I''m posting this for other people''s information, and in case
anyone
else can help.  I''m going to try to find a different way to getting an
OpenSUSE guest (which I want for building some rpms for the 3.2
release).

Ian.

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