Hi everyone,

I have an interesting issue with DAX and KVM - I'm trying to boot a VM
with its memory mapped to a DAX-mounted file (kernel 4.9).

The use case is a bit wacky but I'm trying to recreate something
similar to what clearlinux[1] described (although they don't use this
method anymore).

When mapping the memory to a regular ext4 file, the VM boots fine.
But when mapping to ext4+dax, the VM won't boot or perhaps boots
extremely slowly.
In both cases the FS is on a memory pmem device.

Here's a snippet of how I load things:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/pmem0
mount /dev/pmem0 /mnt
fallocate -l 512M /mnt/mem
qemu-system-x86_64 -nodefconfig -nodefaults \
 -drive if=virtio,file=centos7.qcow2,index=0,media=disk \
 --enable-kvm -serial telnet:localhost:4443,server,nowait \
 -device sga -m 512 -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 \
 -object 
memory-backend-file,prealloc=yes,mem-path=/mnt/mem,share=on,size=512M,id=ram
\
 -numa node,nodeid=0,cpus=0,memdev=ram \
 -net nic,model=virtio,vlan=0 \
 -net user,vlan=0,hostname=vm,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:8001-:22 \
 -name test -monitor telnet:localhost:4444,server,nowait

I use a headless host so I usually connect to the VM with 'telnet
localhost 4443'.

The above works and the VM boots in seconds.
When adding '-o dax' to the mount command, I can catch the grub menu
during boot but it gets stuck.
Sometimes if I wait about 20 minutes, I see some kernel boot messages
appear, but no errors.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Yigal

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/
_______________________________________________
Linux-nvdimm mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-nvdimm

Reply via email to