Virtualbox + rump_fs + qemu

[a3an]

Hello Christian,

I have been running Nova 64 bit on a AMD Phenom machine and am using 
qemu version 1.0.

The problem symptoms varied from 'vbox file already existing' to not 
starting virtualbox at all. I decided to switch to Nova 32 bit. Now the 
symptoms are stable, I am getting 'vbox file already exising' every time 
now.

I went through the code of 
genode-14.11/repos/ports/src/virtualbox/frontend/main.cc, which to me 
seems to be the driver of VirtualBox proper.

At around line 106 I found rc = machine->init(virtualbox, vm_name, 
*machine_config);
This call is unsuccessful and also generates the "Machine : Machine 
settings file '/VirtualBox VMs/w7/w7.vbox' already exists" message. I 
have located the the VirtualBox file where this message is emanating 
from, it is MachineImpl.cpp, which can be found in 
genode-14.11/contrib/virtualbox-fd1a0bb3692bfb4448f3b3f8978fc1c5d037e2c4/src/app/virtualbox/src/VBox/Main/src-server.

This is the function that is called at around line 502:

/**
  *  Initializes a new instance from a machine config that is already in 
memory
  *  (import OVF case). Since we are importing, the UUID in the machine
  *  config is ignored and we always generate a fresh one.
  *
  *  @param strName  Name for the new machine; this overrides what is 
specified in config and is used
  *                  for the settings file as well.
  *  @param config   Machine configuration loaded and parsed from XML.
  *
  *  @return  Success indicator. if not S_OK, the machine object is invalid
  */

HRESULT Machine::init(VirtualBox *aParent,
                       const Utf8Str &strName,
                       const settings::MachineConfigFile &config)

In here, Machine::tryCreateMachineConfigFile() is called (at 534). This 
call finds out that the vbox file already exists and terminates VirtualBox.

I have tried to call Machine::initFromSettings() instaed in main.cc, but 
that causes a lot more error messages for which I am lacking detailed 
knowledge about the innards of VirtualBox.

Up to here, I don't think qemu or atapi_drv are to blame for this 
problem, the call to Machine::init() looks to be the problem.

So, how exactly did genode.org succeed in executing  Windows 7 with 
VirtualBox on Nova using genode-14.11 ?

Regards, Adrian Schuur.


Am 24.02.2015 um 19:21 schrieb Christian Prochaska:
> Hello Adrian,
>
> I could not reproduce the same problem you reported, but found two other
> problems when trying to run VirtualBox in Qemu:
>
> First, 'atapi_drv' does not run well on newer Qemu versions (I used Qemu
> 2.2.0), so I changed your run script to use the 'ahci' driver instead
> (see attachment).
>
> Then I tried to run TinyCore Linux in the VM (with both the .vbox and
> the .iso file in the root directory of the ext2 image) and when the
> Linux kernel started to boot, VirtualBox reported 'invalid gueststate'
> errors and the kernel boot process never finished.
>
> So, even if you can find out why your VirtualBox complains about the
> 'w7.vbox' file, I would not have too high hopes of getting your VM
> running in VirtualBox on Qemu (or with AMD SVM hardware virtualization
> in general) without some prior work on the VirtualBox port. So far we
> have used and tested VirtualBox mainly on Intel hardware. Would that be
> an option for you?
>
> Regards,
> Christian
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored
> by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all
> things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to
> news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the
> conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> genode-main mailing list
> genode-main at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/genode-main

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.genode.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20150225/c99c9f8b/attachment.html>