this is probably PR 12189.
the vnd code has serious design flaws.

you can reduce the likelihood of hitting that problem
by using the raw vnd device instead of the block vnd device
as much as possible.

-Chuck


On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 10:37:35AM +0300, Martti Kuparinen wrote:
> While trying to create an image ("harddisk") for Linux domU I got the
> dom0 in some weird state: I'm able to ping it but _nothing_ else works.
> I can login from the console (type root and the password) but I don't
> get the shell prompt.
> 
> This is what I did:
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/linux bs=1024k count=4096
> vnconfig vnd0 /tmp/linux
> fdisk -i /dev/vnd0d
> fdisk -u /dev/vnd0d
> 
> 0: Linux native (sysid 131)
>     start 63, size 8128827 (3969 MB, Cyls 0-506)
> 1: Linux swap or Prime or Solaris (sysid 130)
>     start 8128890, size 259718 (127 MB, Cyls 506-522/42/33)
> 2: <UNUSED>
> 3: <UNUSED>
> 
> disklabel /dev/vnd0d
> 
>  e:   8128827        63 Linux Ext2      0     0
>  f:    259718   8128890       swap
> 
> mkfs.ext3 /dev/vnd0e
> <hangs here in the middle of mkfs>