[Qemu-devel] [Bug 613529] Re: qemu does not accept regular disk geometry

[Thomas Huth]

Which version of QEMU have you been using for your tests? Can you still
reproduce this problem with the latest version of QEMU?

** Changed in: qemu
       Status: New => Incomplete

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/613529

Title:
  qemu does not accept regular disk geometry

Status in QEMU:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Hi,

  I am currently hunting a strange bug in qemu/kvm:

  I am using an lvm logical volume as a virtual hard disk for a virtual
  machine.

  I use fdisk or parted to create a partition table and partitions,
  kpartx to generate the device entries for the partitions, then install
  linux on ext3/ext4 with grub or msdos filesystem with syslinux.

  But then, in most cases even the boot process fails or behaves
  strangely, sometimes even mounting the file system in the virtual
  machine fails. It seems as if there is a problem with the virtual disk
  geometry. The problem does not seem to occur if I reboot the host
  system after creating the partition table on the logical volume. I
  guess the linux kernel needs to learn the disk geometry by reboot. A
  blkdev --rereadpt does not work on lvm volumes.

  The first approach to test/fix the problem would be to pass the disk
  geometry to qemu/lvm with the -drive option. Unfortunately, qemu/kvm
  does not accept the default geometry with 255 heads and 63 sectors.
  Seems to limit the number of heads to 16, thus limiting the disk size.

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