kernel virtual machine

I always start with a newly created image file and install
from a Windows 2003 Server ISO which is well tested in the
physical machines and under vmware.
To give a little more background, I install the following
before installing the product under test (restarting when
approprate) : Windows Updates, Acorbat, Office 2003, Winzip,
Visual Basic 6, DirectX, SQL Server, Oracle Server.
The products we test require a DVD for space.
This may be a more heavy usage of Windows 2003 Server running
in a kvm environment.

Did you start with the Windows Server 2003 image which is available free
from Microsoft,
and convert it to qcow2 using 'qemu-img convert'? That conversion is
known to be buggy.

I use qcow2
The host disk format is xfs
I do not have access to the computers until Aug 10th
so I cannot test the raw format until them.

What disk format are you using?

Does switching to raw format help?

Regarding using daily builds.
From Build 20080707, my existing guests would not start.
Have rebuilt one guest using 20080708. Seems OK but need
to be running more guests for longer time to be sure.
I will not have access to the environment from July 12 to Aug 10

Sorry, I am not that advanced on the usage of git.

If you would care to send instructions, I will try.

I am currently using the latest snapshots.

It appears to be working enough to for my requirements, but I have still
been getting the odd corruption message.

P.S. I believe that kvm is an absolute winning concept.

For some reason, I thought a virtio patch would help you, when you
obviously aren't using that with windows guests. It could still be
something with the i/o thread though. Is there any way you can do a git
bisect to figure out where exactly it breaks? I know it's hard to do
something like that when it takes so long to trigger the issue. It may be
our only option though.

kvm-69 doesn't have the i/o thread (I think), so it should be safe to use
if you just need something that works.

Patch did not fix problem.
Had one XP guest hang with build 20080626
Are currently running with build 20080626 on both hosts
to assess disk corruption occurances.

Regarding the patch. This seemed to fix the problem,
but will keep re-running for a week before being certain.

Regarding the computer freezing, tried snapshot 20080626,
whilst one guest SEEMED to hang for seconds/minutes, it kept running.

Thank you very much iggy_cav

I have applied the patch and begun testing.
I will update after testing.

Can you try to revert (patch -R) the virtio async feature? Someone else in
the irc channel that was having fs corruption had luck doing that.
http://people.redhat.com/~mtosatti/virtioblk-async.patch

Otherwise, just stick with the kvm-69 userspace until it's fixed.

Windows 2003 Guests also have random BSOD

The problems in this bug report put a stop to running Windows 2003 Server
on kvm
at this point in time.

The message : apic write: bad size=1 fee00030
does not occur when using the option : -no-kvm-irqchip
Will continue testing.

The message : apic write: bad size=1 fee00030

only occurs when the guest is started using kvm.

i.e does not occur with the -no-kvm option.

When using the -no-acpi option, the guest does not start kvm or no kvm

Noted that I get the following in the linux console :

apic write: bad size=1 fee00030