FreeBSD Alpha5 amd64 - Citrix Xen 6.2 problem

[Shanker Balan]

On 13-Oct-2013, at 8:18 AM, Justin T. Gibbs <gibbs at scsiguy.com> wrote:

> On Oct 10, 2013, at 3:09 AM, Shanker Balan <mail at shankerbalan.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 10-Oct-2013, at 1:37 PM, Shanker Balan <mail at shankerbalan.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 09-Oct-2013, at 8:06 PM, Mark Felder <feld at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 8:53, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>>>>> On 09/10/13 13:49, Mark Felder wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 2:46, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>>>>>>> On 09/10/13 08:18, Shanker Balan wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 08-Oct-2013, at 9:19 PM, Mark Felder <feld at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013, at 9:45, Josias L.G wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Problem with Citrix Xen 6.2 and install from ISO. The "solution" was
>>>>>>>>>> remove cd-rom drive from virtual machine. Not possible now with xen
>>>>>>>>>> default in GENERIC kernel.
>>>>>>>>>> Message error: 
>>>>>>>>>> run_interrupt_driven_hooks - still waiting after 300 seconds for
>>>>>>>>>> xenbusb_nop_confighook_cb
>>>>>>>>>> panic: run_interrupt_driven_config_hooks: waited too long
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> I was going to test this soon... but you're right -- you probably can't
>>>>>>>>> install FreeBSD 10 from ISO on Citrix XenServer because of this bug.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Can someone working on the xen bits test and maybe find a workaround?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> The "xenbusb_nop_confighook_cb" issue is the only issue which I am aware
>>>>>>>> of that prevents CloudStack/XenServer IaaS private clouds from offering
>>>>>>>> FreeBSD 10 as a supported OS template. The "vbd-destroy" workaround is not
>>>>>>>> possible as the ISO is attached to the VM instance during the installation.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> A "please pretty please" request to @citrix R&D for the hopefully last fix
>>>>>>>> to get FreeBSD 10 running on XenServer+CloudStack.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> The earlier HyperV related panic on XenServer has been fixed in ALPHA5.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I've taken a look into this and I'm afraid there's no easy way to
>>>>>>> workaround it from FreeBSD. When Xen is detected all IDE devices are
>>>>>>> disconnected, and there's no fine grained way to only disable IDE disks
>>>>>>> and not cdrom devices.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Could you please contact your XenServer representative, and/or submit
>>>>>>> this bug to xs-devel (xs-devel at lists.xenserver.org) mailing lists in
>>>>>>> order to get this fixed on XenServer.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Citrix is aware of this as I've contacted several people there and this
>>>>>> has been discussed both here and on the xs-devel list. There has to be
>>>>>> something FreeBSD can do to work around this issue since Linux and
>>>>>> NetBSD have no issues.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Linux and NetBSD have no issues because you probably only tried them on
>>>>> PV mode, which doesn't exhibit this issue (also NetBSD doesn't have
>>>>> PVHVM support, so it's quite clear it won't have this issue).
>>>>> 
>>>>>> As far as I'm aware the issue has been tracked
>>>>>> down to badly behaving qemu in XenServer -- they don't use upstream qemu
>>>>>> in XenServer (yet), and instead have their own fork. A future release is
>>>>>> supposed to merge with upstream qemu.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The main problem here is that XenServer announces a PV block device on
>>>>> xenstore (the cdrom), but then it seems like there's no backend to
>>>>> handle it, so it hangs on the connection phase. IMHO the problem is not
>>>>> with the device model (Qemu), but with the backend that should handle
>>>>> this PV device.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Xen only allows you to either disable all IDE devices or none, so the
>>>>> only possible solution I can think of is to not disable anything at all
>>>>> and use the emulated devices, which will leave us with very poor
>>>>> performance (unless I'm missing something, there's no way to only
>>>>> disable disks but not cdroms).
>>>>> 
>>>>>> But the fact remains that this is a non-issue on Linux and NetBSD who
>>>>>> handle this buggy virtual CDROM without any problems. There has to be
>>>>>> some way we can add a quirk on our side so this device doesn't stop the
>>>>>> entire boot process. If FreeBSD 10 is released without out-of-the-box
>>>>>> support on the premier commercial Xen platform we'll be shooting
>>>>>> ourselves in the foot and all of this work will be for naught. Amazon
>>>>>> isn't the only Xen platform people use.
>>>>> 
>>>>> You can always use the pre-build VM images I guess (I have not tested
>>>>> those, but I expect they should work fine under Xen).
>>>>> 
>>>>> ftp://ftp.nl.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/VM-IMAGES/20131007/10.0-ALPHA5/amd64/
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> This is way better. Having ready to import Xen images beats ISO installation
>>> any day. Will try on my cloudstack setup later today.
>> 
>> I converted the QCOV image to VHD and have imported it into CloudStack. Instance
>> created from the template also have the "xenbusb" issue at bootup.
>> 
>> Oh well.
>> 
>> Thanks for all the help.
>> 
>> Regards.
>> @shankerbalan
> 
> The CDROM issue should be resolved in FreeBSD/head.  These fixes will be include
> in 10.0-BETA2 as well as the first 11-CURRENT snapshot that should pop up in
> the next day or two.  The snapshots are announced on the freebsd-snapshots
> mailing list.


I just saw the commit myself. Really looking forward to FreeBSD 10 on XenServers. 

Thank you very much much.

Regards.
@shankerbalan