Arch Linux

shtrom

Member

Registered: 2009-06-10

Posts: 8

Website

Corrupted QCOW image with ArchLinux-2013.05.01 in QEmu?

Hi all,

I'm trying to prepare an OpenStack image for ArchLinux (64bit). I got the latest install ISO (2013.05.01-dual), and am following a combination of [0, s/kvm/qemu/] and [1]. The host is also an ArchLinux machine with qemu-1.4.1-3, and I boot the VM with (no KVM):
  qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -cdrom ../archlinux-2013.05.01-dual.iso -drive file=test.img,if=virtio,index=0 -boot d -net nic -net user -nographic -vnc :2

I have done the installing process several times, but the disk image (QCOW) seems to get corrupted randomly, but rather often, upon the first cold reboot (^Ax, then restart Qemu). It gets to Grub, but Grub then stalls there. When I boot on the install disc again, mount the partition, and try to access the files, I get various FS error, and fsck seems to make the matter worse by unlinking inodes of needed files.

As an experiment, I tried booting the ISO, creating the partition and FS (both ext4 then ext3), and dd a bit of /dev/random to that partition, before taking an md5sum of it, and writing it in a file on the same partition. Invariably on reboot, both files show up empty (with cat), though an ls would show them to have a non-0 size (the same as before the reboot).

I successfully installed Debian 7 with the same setup, and even ended up taking that disk image, rm -rf'ing everyting, and pacstrap'ing on top of it. It worked better, in that I could eventually boot the host ArchLinux, but data still gets randomly corrupted (resulting in FS error and segfaults). Reinstalling the faulty packages usually fixes the issue for a while (unless it is GnuPG, which segfaults make all package re-install faill, forcing me to reboot on the ISO, and reinstall the faulty package with pacman -r /mnt).

This is very odd, and an obvious culprit might be the kernel (3.9.4) in the host, but I cannot understand what is happening.

Is this behaviour familiar to anyone? Any idea about what it could be de to?

[0] https://cssoss.wordpress.com/2011/11/28 … openstack/
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

Last edited by shtrom (2013-06-05 04:50:13)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Corrupted QCOW image with ArchLinux-2013.05.01 in QEmu?

Have you tried the June image (or any other iso)?
The latest iso is from June.

shtrom

Member

Registered: 2009-06-10

Posts: 8

Website

Re: Corrupted QCOW image with ArchLinux-2013.05.01 in QEmu?

I didn't at the time. I did now with the June ISO, and it works.

Weird.

shtrom

Member

Registered: 2009-06-10

Posts: 8

Website

Re: Corrupted QCOW image with ArchLinux-2013.05.01 in QEmu?

Woops. I spoke too soon. I tried booting this freshly installed image, and there it goes again: Grub cannot find normal.mod, and goes in rescue mode.

Similarly to before, I also get FS I/O errors when remounting this new partition from the install live environment.