[virt-tools-list] how to virtualize an ancient 2.2 kernel

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

Am 17.10.2012 23:33, schrieb Cole Robinson:
> On 10/17/2012 05:23 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
>> Am 17.10.2012 02:53, schrieb Cole Robinson:
>>
>>> Your guest config up thread looked fine AFAICT. But then I've never tried to
>>> run a kernel-2.2 VM.
>>>
>>> The OS type in virt-manager for linux 2.4 vs. generic isn't going to make much
>>> difference either.
>>>
>>> Maybe try switch the CPU model to some older type CPUs pentium2 etc, whatever
>>> was common around the time of that release. Perhaps also try switch domain
>>> type="qemu", occasionally kvm can interfere with things.
>>>
>>> Barring any of those, I'd try and build a qemu command line by hand that
>>> reproduces the issue, confirm with latest qemu, and mail qemu-devel about your
>>> issue.
>>
>> Thanks for your suggestions, Cole.
>>
>> As you may have read already I was able to solve that issue by enabling
>> DMA for that virtual IDE-drive.  This helped to fix the performance
>> problems!
>>
> 
> Hmm, I didn't see that. Just curious, where was that discussed? And how did
> you turn on IDE DMA?

I only posted that to the libvirt-users-ml, sorry.

Basically I added some commands to the startup-scripts of the guest:

/etc/rc.d/boot.local now contains:

/sbin/hdparm -d1 -m16 /dev/hda
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -m16 /dev/hdb

I wasn't successful with adding kernel-options in lilo.conf, maybe that
old 2.2-kernel doesn't really get it.

So at boot-time it runs without DMA until that boot.local script gets
started, from there it is quite fast and responsive.

Stefan