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I have three Windows XP guests running on a recently upgraded 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 system. Occasionally (on the order of once every few days), one of the guests will become non-responsive and the kvm process on the host which is running that guest will start consuming 100% CPU. It will continue to do so until it is killed. When restarted, it will be fine for a while, and then the issue repeats.

The kvm command line used to run all three guests is this:

/usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-0.12 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1 -name bigdog21vmxp1 \
    -uuid ea47ff84-125b-16f7-9a4d-a6d0d8bab46a \
    -chardev socket,id=monitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/bigdog21vmxp1.monitor,server,nowait \
    -monitor chardev:monitor \
    -localtime \
    -boot c \
    -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/windowsxp-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,boot=on,format=qcow2 \
    -net nic,macaddr=54:52:00:02:06:0e,vlan=0,name=nic.0 \
    -net tap,fd=58,vlan=0,name=tap.0 \
    -chardev pty,id=serial0 \
    -serial chardev:serial0 \
    -parallel none \
    -usb \
    -usbdevice tablet \
    -vnc 127.0.0.1:1 \
    -k en-us \
    -vga cirrus \
    -soundhw es1370

Why do the systems misbehave this way sometimes? And what configuration can I change in order to fix it? Or, if the problem is due to a bug in kvm, what is the process for isolating a kvm failure so that the developers have a chance of fixing it?

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  • Have you tried using a different image type to see if the problem continues? I'd try a raw image file as it takes a lot of code out of play. Also is the image on local storage or being served via NFS? Nov 18, 2010 at 5:14
  • Oh my. I forgot I'd posted this question. I also forget how I resolved the issue, but my Windows XP guests haven't been hanging for a while, so I guess I did somehow. Nov 18, 2010 at 5:33
  • Yeah I didn't realise how old the question was either. I wonder how it popped back onto the first page of questions. Nov 18, 2010 at 19:57

2 Answers 2

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The best way I have to debug this is to remove all but the necessary arguments and add the removed arguments until it breaks again. That's the only way I could find my problem last time (on uec 10.10).

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What are the chances that the issue occurs whenever the Windows guest tries to restart (e.g. after an automatic update)? I always got freeze-on-restart behavior from Windows guests under libvirt+kvm on Ubuntu Jaunty; now that my host is running Debian Squeeze, it doesn't happen any more.

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