I do you virtio block in a very similar setup to yours (fully static kernel, -kernel option to kvm/qemu) sucesfully for quite a a while.
Can you post your kernel .config and the contents of /proc/devices and /proc/partitions to debug this further? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
