I wonder if this a slackware issue but here it goes.

I have installed Qemu 1.3 from slackbuilds on my newly installed Slackware 14.1.
System is a HP ML350 with an Quadcore Xeon and 8GB of memory.
The guest is windows 7 (X17-59465)
It installs OK, boots OK and runs fine for a couple of hours.
Reboot sometimes works but most of the time it (re-)starts in recovery mode.

I installed with the following :

qemu-img create -f qcow2 /images/win7.qcow2 50G

and

emu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm \
-vnc 0.0.0.0:5 \
-boot d \
-drive file=${DISKIMG},if=ide \
-m 1534 \
-net nic,model=rtl8139 -net tap,ifname=tap1,script=no \
-cdrom ${WIN7IMG} \
-drive file=${VIRTIMG},index=3,media=cdrom \
-rtc base=localtime,clock=host \
-smp cores=1 \
-usbdevice tablet \
-cpu host \
-vga vmware

I have tried the virtio as well but these driver give me even more trouble.

Any one an idea ?

grtz

Simon

The first thing I would do is try to run the windows 7 vm under another linux distribution; it might very well be something obscure in slackware causing that problem. I have had very good results with SUSE (10.3 to be exact).

It really won't matter the distribution. KVM/qemu works the same regardless of distribution so it's probably a kernel hardware emulation issue.

I would try a different VM like VirtualBox or VMware first and see if it's a VM limitation with KVM/qemu. If not, I would upgrade to the latest stable kernel and then give it a shot.

VirtualBox is one of the most recommended as it's driver support and hardware emulation is fairly modernized and up to date. Get the Oracle official release rather than the OSE. If you need a setup for hardware I know the ICH9 Intel setup with SCSI lsilogic hard disks work generally well for Windows vista/7/8/8.1

Last night i tried making a VM by using AQEMU.
So far it has not crashed on me.

Even rebooting the host did not lead to Win7 guest crashes as I had before.

best regards


Simon

@the_zone: compare your command with AQEMU's command line. Sometimes its a question of improper qemu options.

Unfortunately using aqemu did not resolve my issue.
I have been playing with options, like CPU type and machine type, which was fruitless as well.
In the coming days I want to upgrade to qemu current (1.7.1) and try again.
I really have no clue what to look for.
Is my virtual disk changing? Due to late write back?
So far is I have used sparse and non-sparse files.

At this point I would upgrade qemu to 2.0.0 (latest). qemu-1.3 is very old and there have been numerous changs and fixes since then.

I have indeed upgraded to qemu 2.0.0 this weekend.
First result are not encouraging.
I got an internal KVM crash and qemu dumped all registers contents.

I do not know if this has todo with the machine I created / qemu options since i changed them somewhat.
Hopefully today I start over with the qemu machine options posted above.