[illumos-Developer] Something for later but interesting IMHO

[Martin Bochnig]

>> Damian Wojs??aw <damian at wojslaw.pl> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, I'm using it, but VirtualBox on OpenSolaris asks me to turn on
>>> virt flags support in order to host 64bit guests.
>>
>> This is something you need to do in your BIOS, did you?
>>
>> Jörg
>>
>
> No, as I said previously, it is turned on in BIOS, this is why I had
> problems with upgrading to build 130.


 >  -B intel-iommu=no



Hi.


I have 2 x64 Laptops as my power-saving 24x7 Desktop systems with USB
storage. One is Intel DC 2GHz, the other is AMD Athlon64 DC 2GHz. From
this background I can tell you 2 things:

* I use 32bit and 64 bit guests in Vbox all the time, with VT-x
enabled and it works
(so, alternatively this would also allow me to use Xen aka Sun xVM
with generic guest kernels)

* back at circa builds 107 till about 111 or 113 I had exactly the
same problems on the AMD side: Without   -B intel-iommu=no (and there
are similar options) the kernel would immediately panic (in some
cases) or freeze (with different combinations of kernel boot options
being present vs. absent).


To find a hack: First let´s look into the bug archives. There were at
least 2 bug reports with more details.
Then we can check the OS/Net commits from that time. As it suddenly
worked again after build 113, I did not investigate further. But if we
see, what they did then to fix this (mis)behavior on AMD chips, maybe
we get a clue how to get it working on your Intel CPU and chipset.
That would be the way to go. Unfortunately it has become highly
unlikely, that the Oracle employees originally working on the old
bugfix will help us.



%martin