Re: NetBSD as virtual machine in KVM

[iMil <imil%home.imil.net@localhost>]

Hi,

> I've started to install NetBSD without problems inside a virtual machine
> with KVM on Linux (Ubuntu 7.04).
>
> After that I configured NetBSD to use dhcp for the one and only NIC
> "ne1". And there comes my first problem:
>
> Mar  8 23:32:26 crusty /netbsd: ne1: device timeout

Ok, many hints here. First, what NetBSD version are you running ? NetBSD 
5.0RC2 still fails for me and many others under KVM and VirtualBox, stick 
to 4.0.1 for the time being.

The first thing you want to check is that you start your NetBSD vm 
without ACPI support (-no-acpi) and without SMP support.

For the NIC, the default KVM card, rtl8139, works after a little bit 
of tweaking: default NetBSD rtl8139 driver, re(4), is unusable 
(re0: watchdog timeout) under KVM,
http://mail-index4.netbsd.org/port-xen/2006/10/25/0001.html explains that 
the old rtk(4) driver just works, that's the one I'm using. You'll have to 
disable the re(4) driver (simply comment the re* line) and recompile the 
NetBSD 4 kernel, rtk(4) will then handle your NIC.

Here is my NetBSD 4.0.1 vm startup script :

kvm /data/virt/netbsd4.img \
        -net nic,macaddr=00:56:01:02:03:04,model=rtl8139 \
        -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=/home/imil/etc/qemu-ifup \
        -hdb /data/virt/home.qcow2 \
        -m 512 \
        -no-acpi \
        -localtime \
        -curses

Hope this helps.

regards,

----------------------------------------
Emile "iMil" Heitor <imil%home.imil.net@localhost>                              
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