FreeBSD Alpha5 amd64 - Citrix Xen 6.2 problem

[Mark Felder]

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013, at 21:48, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
> On Oct 10, 2013, at 3:09 AM, Shanker Balan <mail at shankerbalan.net> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On 10-Oct-2013, at 1:37 PM, Shanker Balan <mail at shankerbalan.net> wrote:
> > 
> >> On 09-Oct-2013, at 8:06 PM, Mark Felder <feld at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 8:53, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> >>>> On 09/10/13 13:49, Mark Felder wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 2:46, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> >>>>>> On 09/10/13 08:18, Shanker Balan wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 08-Oct-2013, at 9:19 PM, Mark Felder <feld at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> >>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013, at 9:45, Josias L.G wrote:
> >>>>>>>>> Problem with Citrix Xen 6.2 and install from ISO. The "solution" was
> >>>>>>>>> remove cd-rom drive from virtual machine. Not possible now with xen
> >>>>>>>>> default in GENERIC kernel.
> >>>>>>>>> Message error: 
> >>>>>>>>> run_interrupt_driven_hooks - still waiting after 300 seconds for
> >>>>>>>>> xenbusb_nop_confighook_cb
> >>>>>>>>> panic: run_interrupt_driven_config_hooks: waited too long
> >>>>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>>> I was going to test this soon... but you're right -- you probably can't
> >>>>>>>> install FreeBSD 10 from ISO on Citrix XenServer because of this bug.
> >>>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>>> Can someone working on the xen bits test and maybe find a workaround?
> >>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>> The "xenbusb_nop_confighook_cb" issue is the only issue which I am aware
> >>>>>>> of that prevents CloudStack/XenServer IaaS private clouds from offering
> >>>>>>> FreeBSD 10 as a supported OS template. The "vbd-destroy" workaround is not
> >>>>>>> possible as the ISO is attached to the VM instance during the installation.
> >>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>> A "please pretty please" request to @citrix R&D for the hopefully last fix
> >>>>>>> to get FreeBSD 10 running on XenServer+CloudStack.
> >>>>>>> 
> >>>>>>> The earlier HyperV related panic on XenServer has been fixed in ALPHA5.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> Hello,
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> I've taken a look into this and I'm afraid there's no easy way to
> >>>>>> workaround it from FreeBSD. When Xen is detected all IDE devices are
> >>>>>> disconnected, and there's no fine grained way to only disable IDE disks
> >>>>>> and not cdrom devices.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> Could you please contact your XenServer representative, and/or submit
> >>>>>> this bug to xs-devel (xs-devel at lists.xenserver.org) mailing lists in
> >>>>>> order to get this fixed on XenServer.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> Citrix is aware of this as I've contacted several people there and this
> >>>>> has been discussed both here and on the xs-devel list. There has to be
> >>>>> something FreeBSD can do to work around this issue since Linux and
> >>>>> NetBSD have no issues.
> >>>> 
> >>>> Linux and NetBSD have no issues because you probably only tried them on
> >>>> PV mode, which doesn't exhibit this issue (also NetBSD doesn't have
> >>>> PVHVM support, so it's quite clear it won't have this issue).
> >>>> 
> >>>>> As far as I'm aware the issue has been tracked
> >>>>> down to badly behaving qemu in XenServer -- they don't use upstream qemu
> >>>>> in XenServer (yet), and instead have their own fork. A future release is
> >>>>> supposed to merge with upstream qemu.
> >>>> 
> >>>> The main problem here is that XenServer announces a PV block device on
> >>>> xenstore (the cdrom), but then it seems like there's no backend to
> >>>> handle it, so it hangs on the connection phase. IMHO the problem is not
> >>>> with the device model (Qemu), but with the backend that should handle
> >>>> this PV device.
> >>>> 
> >>>> Xen only allows you to either disable all IDE devices or none, so the
> >>>> only possible solution I can think of is to not disable anything at all
> >>>> and use the emulated devices, which will leave us with very poor
> >>>> performance (unless I'm missing something, there's no way to only
> >>>> disable disks but not cdroms).
> >>>> 
> >>>>> But the fact remains that this is a non-issue on Linux and NetBSD who
> >>>>> handle this buggy virtual CDROM without any problems. There has to be
> >>>>> some way we can add a quirk on our side so this device doesn't stop the
> >>>>> entire boot process. If FreeBSD 10 is released without out-of-the-box
> >>>>> support on the premier commercial Xen platform we'll be shooting
> >>>>> ourselves in the foot and all of this work will be for naught. Amazon
> >>>>> isn't the only Xen platform people use.
> >>>> 
> >>>> You can always use the pre-build VM images I guess (I have not tested
> >>>> those, but I expect they should work fine under Xen).
> >>>> 
> >>>> ftp://ftp.nl.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/VM-IMAGES/20131007/10.0-ALPHA5/amd64/
> >>>> 
> >> 
> >> This is way better. Having ready to import Xen images beats ISO installation
> >> any day. Will try on my cloudstack setup later today.
> > 
> > I converted the QCOV image to VHD and have imported it into CloudStack. Instance
> > created from the template also have the "xenbusb" issue at bootup.
> > 
> > Oh well.
> > 
> > Thanks for all the help.
> > 
> > Regards.
> > @shankerbalan
> 
> The CDROM issue should be resolved in FreeBSD/head.  These fixes will be
> include
> in 10.0-BETA2 as well as the first 11-CURRENT snapshot that should pop up
> in
> the next day or two.  The snapshots are announced on the
> freebsd-snapshots
> mailing list.
> 

Can you please backport to 9-STABLE? This issue is what is preventing me
from upgrading my Xen infrastructure at work.

Thanks so much!