Re: WinXP virtual crashes on 0.12.1.2 but not 0.12.1.1

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@siriusit.co.uk>]

Avi Kivity wrote:

> It probably did make some kind of difference.  Please try a clean install.

After several hours of testing, I've finally found out what the problem is.

I tried a clean WinXP guest install and that worked, so it was obviously 
a driver issue. After disabling various drivers in the WinXP guest, I 
didn't get anywhere so I decided to take a break and test Marcelo's VNC 
patch. With this applied, I could actually see all of the information in 
the BSOD which showed the error was in intelppm.sys.

A quick search took me to this page here: 
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/24/484461.aspx 
which explains the issue in more detail. I first tried disabling the 
intelppm driver and rebooting, but that didn't make a difference; 
however disabling the Processor driver worked and my guest VM booted in 
Normal Mode :)

I think the issue is probably similar to that explained in the article 
above; with a new processor reported to the guest, the internal 
processor driver tries to upload some kind of microcode to the new 
device which fails and causes the guest to fall over. Can we teach KVM 
to silently discard these kinds of updates?


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
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