[Libvir] Fix handling of HVM boot parameters

Jim Fehlig jfehlig at novell.com
Mon Aug 14 22:53:59 UTC 2006


Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> Jeremy mentioned that it looked like libvirt wasn't able to create an
> HVM domain configured to boot off cdrom, so I took a closer look at the
> code and indeed the code dealing with <boot> section was both incomplete,
> and just plain broken. Incomplete in so much as it never included details
> of the ISO file backing the CDROM, and broken in so much as it was doing
> string comparisons against the wrong variables. Digging further found
> lots more work relating to creation of HVM domains so I've had a go at
> writing a patch to resolve matters.
>
>  * Parsing of UUID from SEXPR assumed that the UUID fetched would always
>    have four '-' in the usual places. Well, when you run 'dumpxml' from
>    virsh the <uuid> element has the UUID encoded without any '-' chars.
>    If you feed this back into 'virsh create' and then once again run
>    'dumpxml' parsing will fail & libvirt throws errors. So this patch
>    allows for parsing of UUID's without '-'.
>  * The XML document size was limited to 1k - we just 'malloc(1000)'. While
>    this was enough for common cases, if someone creates lots of disk or
>    network devices this would overflow and libvirt return an error. So I
>    increased it to 4k which ought to be enough for forseeable future - in
>    any case my previous patch to fetch XML via the proxy is limited to 4k
>    in size too.
>
> Now onto the fine details...
>
> When converting SEXPR into XML current code is doing the following:
>
>      (boot a)   ->  <boot dev='/dev/fd0'/>
>      (boot c)   ->  <boot dev='hda'/>
>      (boot d)   ->  <boot dev='/dev/cdrom'/>
>
> This is rather inconsistent - the 'hda' is intended to map to an entry
> in <devices> block. The '/dev/fd0' and '/dev/cdrom' entries did not
> map to anything. 
>
> Meanwhile, when converting from XML to SXEXPR it is doing the following
>
>     <boot dev='hda'/>    -> (boot a)
>     <boot dev='hdd'/>    -> (boot d)
>     <boot dev='*'/>      -> (boot c)
>
> Obviously this sucks because these processes should be matching each
> other. 
>
>
> Secondly, the (image (hvm....)) SEXPR has three entries for defining
> the ISO / disk image file backing the CDROM / Floppy devices. These
> were just being ignored, rather than turned into <disk> entries within
> the <devices> block. Similarly there was no way to express a <disk>
> entry for CDROM/Floppy in the XML when creating a domain.
>
> The upshot of all this is that although the last release of libvirt
> included HVM support it was basically unusable for domain creation
> unless you were using HD to boot. The XML returned was also incorrect.
>
> Now the good news. Since it was sooo broken, we can fix without worrying
> about XML compatability since there is no way any application could be
> relying on it in its current state.
>   

Sorry to have dumped the HVM code in such crude shape.  I wanted to 
finish the work when returning from vacation in July but became 
distracted with other tasks :-(, and then went on another vacation last 
week :-).  The patch I sent in June only worked for the most basic 
configurations.  Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the state of the 
patch when posted.

BTW, I like the resulting patch from this thread.  My apologies again 
for not following through on the HVM support.

Regards,
Jim




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