[Qemu-devel] kqemu and XP guest - lock-up at mup.sys

[Gordan Bobic]

Hi,

It would appear that kqemu somehow breaks the XP guest under some 
circumstances.

If I install from scratch in qemu+kqemu, it works fine in kqemu, but not 
on bare metal. The fact it doesn't work on bare metal COULD be related 
to the fact that on bare metal I'm running off a USB stick (it's a 
rescue system).

If I install onto bare metal (again, onto a USB stick - I have a 
modified installer that includes the USB disk drivers at setup stage) 
and then start up that install in qemu, that works as long as I don't 
apply kqemu. But if I modprobe kqemu and start with 
-enable-kqemu/-kernel-kqemu (-smp 1 in all cases), the quest instanty 
locks up at 100% CPU usage. Everything else about the qemu configuration 
is exactly the same between the runs. Booting the system with -no-acpi 
at this point causes it to reboot instead of just locking up.

I tried with qemu 0.10.5 (RHEL5 from atrpms) and 0.11.1 (built from 
source). kqemu I use is dkms 1.4.0pre1 from the Dag repository.

With kqemu, the guest stops booting (including safe mode) at mup.sys. 
Googling around for similar problems didn't reveal much of use (other 
than the usual Windows solution to everything of "reinstall", which 
isn't an option here because I need the same setup to work both on bare 
metal and in qemu). Is there a work-around/tweak to make this work? Is 
there any particular reason why kqemu would break things under these 
circumstances when running without kqemu works fine, if slower? Is there 
a difference in how the emulated hardware looks/behaves with and without 
kqemu?

Thanks.

Gordan