Kernel 3.5.3 partially broken for virtualization

Some time ago, Fedora 17 got a Kernel update to 3.5.3-1. Since then, PXE booting virtual machines does not work anymore. It seems that it has not been fixed in the upstream Kernel, but only the 3.5 series of Kernels is affected.

A bug has been filed, but no fix is available. The only solution for now is to stick to Kernel 3.4.5-2. I’ve checked the Fedora annouce mailinglist, looks like there have been no grave bugfixes since then.

The bug only hits when you use PXE boot virtual machines with qemu-kvm. The virtual machine gets just paused, to find out the reason for it, you need to have a closer look to /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log. There you can read: “KVM: entry failed, hardware error 0x80000021“.

Someone proposed to use the emulate_invalid_guest_state=y parameter to the kvm_intel module, but according to a Ubuntu bugreport it fails too, but differently.

Hopefully a bug fix will be made available soon.

Having fun? Well, could be worse, could be better.

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