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I'm using a KVM hypervisor on a Ubuntu Server 12.04 server. My virtual machine's virtual disks are LVM volumes, formatted as ext3. The guest OSes are all Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 server.

Everything runs smoothly, except that the virtual machines gets stuck during boot, displaying a message like :

fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
/dev/vda1: clean, 260102/6340608 files, 1323923/25337600 blocks

This happens whether the VMs have been rebooted/shat down through normal shell commands or "virsh-destroy"ed. I have to reboot them between 1 and more than 15 times to get them to boot all the way.

When I have to reboot them more than once, the counter one the above message are slightly increased at each reboot.

I have the same issue with another KVM server with a similar setup.

What could cause such a problem and how would I fix it ?

Notes:

  • The server has a raid 6 array of 6 2To disks
  • All the VMs and LVs have been created through virt-manager
  • The filesystem used on both the hypervisor and the VMs is ext4

edit : Title changed after Michael's comment.

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  • That doesn't show a filesystem error. Your VMs are failing to start for non-obvious reasons. Jun 18, 2014 at 13:19
  • Did you figure this out? I'm having the issue now.
    – sontek
    Aug 3, 2014 at 22:38
  • No, I will answer my question if I do
    – iodbh
    Aug 4, 2014 at 9:41

1 Answer 1

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I had a very similar issue after migrating some VMware guests to a new KVM host- until I came across this blog post which referenced back to serverfault.

The solution that worked for me was to add: nomodeset to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" in /etc/default/grub

Don't forget to run update-grub after editing the file.

What is nomodeset?

The newest kernels have moved the video mode setting into the kernel. So all the programming of the hardware specific clock rates and registers on the video card happen in the kernel rather than in the X driver when the X server starts.. This makes it possible to have high resolution nice looking splash (boot) screens and flicker free transitions from boot splash to login screen. Unfortunately, on some cards this doesnt work properly and you end up with a black screen. Adding the nomodeset parameter instructs the kernel to not load video drivers and use BIOS modes instead until X is loaded.

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