I am trying to use nested KVM (VMX) to set up Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization (RHEV) on a single Fedora 17 host. The host hardware is
an Intel DQ67SW board with a Core i7 2600 processor.
I have successfully set up the environment, but I have experienced at
least 2 host kernel panics.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42980
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that both panics have occurred when
there was a lot of network traffic between nested guests running on
separate virtualized hypervisors. (See high-quality ASCII art.)
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| +------------------+ +------------------+ |
| | | | | |
| | +----------+ | | +----------+ | |
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | Nested | | | | Nested | | |
| | | Guest | | | | Guest | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
| | +----------+ | | +----------+ | +------------------+ |
| | | | | | | |
| | Virtual | | Virtual | | RHEV | |
| | Hypervisor | | Hypervisor | | Manager | |
| | (RHEL 6.3) | | (RHEL 6.3) | | (RHEL 6.3) | |
| | | | | | | |
| +------------------+ +------------------+ +------------------+ |
| |
| Physical host (Fedora 17) |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
After the first panic, I did two things to try to make the environment
more stable.
* Disabled VT-d in BIOS
* Changed processor type of the virtual hypervisors (as defined on the
host) to "Conroe":
<cpu mode='custom' match='exact'>
<model fallback='allow'>Conroe</model>
<vendor>Intel</vendor>
<feature policy='require' name='vmx'/>
</cpu>
Unfortunately, those changes did not prevent me from experiencing the
host kernel panic again.
I see that the kvm and kvm_intel modules have a number of parameters.
Are any of these likely to affect the stability of nested VMX?
Thanks!
--
========================================================================
Ian Pilcher [email protected]
Sometimes there's nothing left to do but crash and burn...or die trying.
========================================================================
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