[Qemu-devel] Windows slow boot: contractor wanted

[Richard Davies]

Hi,

We run a cloud hosting provider using qemu-kvm 1.1, and are keen to find a
contractor to track down and fix problems we have with large memory Windows
guests booting very slowly - they can take several hours.

We previously reported these problems in July (copied below) and they are
still present with Linux kernel 3.5.1 and qemu-kvm 1.1.1.

This is a serious issue for us which is causing significant pain to our
larger Windows VM customers when their servers are offline for many hours
during boot.

If anyone knowledgeable in the area would be interested in being paid to
work on this, or if you know someone who might be, I would be delighted to
hear from you.

Cheers,

Richard.


===== Previous bug report

http://marc.info/?l=qemu-devel&m=134304194329745


We have been experiencing this problem for a while now too, using qemu-kvm
(currently at 1.1.1).

Unfortunately, hv_relaxed doesn't seem to fix it. The following command line
produces the issue:

qemu-kvm -nodefaults -m 4096 -smp 8 -cpu host,hv_relaxed -vga cirrus -usbdevice 
tablet -vnc :99 -monitor stdio -hda test.img

The hardware consists of dual AMD Opteron 6128 processors (16 cores in
total) and 64GB of memory. This command line was tested on kernel 3.1.4. 

I've also tested with -no-hpet.

What I have seen is much as described: the memory fills out slowly, and top
on the host will show the process using 100% on all allocated CPU cores. The
most extreme case was a machine which took something between 6 and 8 hours
to boot.

This seems to be related to the assigned memory, as described, but also the
number of processor cores (which makes sense if we believe it's a timing
issue?). I have seen slow-booting guests improved by switching down to a
single or even two cores.

Matthew, I agree that this seems to be linked to the number of VMs running -
in fact, shutting down other VMs on a dedicated test host caused the machine
to start booting at a normal speed (with no reboot required).

However, the level of contention is never such that this could be explained
by the host simply being overcommitted.

If it helps anyone, there's an image of the hard drive I've been using to
test at:

http://46.20.114.253/

It's 5G of gzip file containing a fairly standard Windows 2008 trial
installation. Since it's in the trial period, anyone who wants to use it may
have to re-arm the trial: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948472

Please let me know if I can provide any more information, or test anything.

Best wishes,

Owen Tuz