[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso and OVirt/QEMU status report

Mon Apr 26 19:10:43 UTC 2021

Hi Nelson, thank you for testing

Considering Graphics card support within illumos, I doubt you will be 
very happy with desktop components on any Virtual Machine Platform. We 
do not have the advanced virtio Graphics Card drivers Linux has so you 
will always have a bad time with desktop on anything other than nvidia 
and certain intel at the moment.

Vmware has a Graphics card model which is part of Upstream Quemu which 
was reported to work well, if you have that as an options use that.

As for the Usage on Virtual Machines. 90% of that will be server related 
tasks without GUI. Text installer will be much simpler to install on a 
VM Platform like oVirt.

I saw in an earlier mail, that you mentioned Text Garbage spam in the 
VM. That was due to SPICE protocol (the display share protocol in 
libvirt/RedHat) using the Scroll Lock Key as a Keepalive signal. As 
illumos is a Solaris derivative OS it never had support for the Scroll 
lock key as there was never any keyboard connected to it that had that 
key. We have fixed this in 2018. Since then illumos ignores that key.

Virtualbox is supported and regularly tested as part of the vagrant VM 
releases. Same goes for KVM/Quemu. For GUI on Virtualbox, you will need 
to install the Virtualbox OSE extensions packaged in OI. And you must 
use the OpenSolaris VM profile. Otherwise Graphics glitches and other 
problems occur.

-Till

On 26.04.21 14:21, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> This report follows earlier ones under the subject "The kiss of death"
> that supplied installation reports for virt-manager/QEMU on CentOS 7
> and Ubuntu 20.04, and VirtualBox on another Ubuntu 20.04 system.  This
> one is fairly positive, so I felt it deserved a new subject line.
> 
> Today, I successfully installed OpenIndiana Hipster from
> 
> 	http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso
> 
> on OVirt/QEMU running on CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core).
> 
> As I noted in an earlier report, this virtualization system has the
> advantage of live VM migration, at a cost of considerably more complex
> VM creation and management.  However, once a VM has been successfully
> installed, the platform has been rock solid, and we routinely use the
> VM migration feature to move VMs off one server to another, run system
> updates on the first, reboot, and move back its VMs, without the VMs
> even noticing their two moves.
> 
> I took both OVirt snapshots and ZFS snapshots during the installation
> steps, with multiple reboots, and have now successfully copied over
> /var/opt, /opt/csw, and $prefix/texlive/2021 trees from other systems.
> 
> No boot problems have been observed this time.
> 
> However, there are a few other problems with OpenIndiana Hipster on
> OVirt:
> 
> (1) Ovirt offers three console types: QXL (default), VGA, and CIRRUS.
> 
>      With QXL, the GUI desktop is too high to fit on the screen. Moving
>      the mouse near the bottom edge slides up the display to make the
>      bottom task bar visible.  Moving the mouse near the top edge makes
>      the top menu bar only partly visible.  However, in neither case
>      can the mouse select icons.
> 
>      I shut down the system, changed to VGA, and found the same
>      behavior as with QXL.
> 
>      I again shut down the system, changed to CIRRUS, rebooted, logged
>      in, and now the screen is fully visible, but the mouse cannot
>      select actions from the menu bar or tool bar.  Curiously, moving
>      the mouse over a toolbar item, such as the network icon, produces
>      a yellow popup window that describes the button.  One just cannot
>      select it.
> 
>      With all three video types, there are generally two mouse cursors
>      on the screen, but with CIRRUS, they remain within 5mm of each
>      other.
> 
>      Those mouse problems make the desktop almost unusable.  With the
>      mouse in the central region of the screen, I can get a popup menu
>      from which I can start a terminal.  However, the Applications /
>      Places / System / Network / ... menu bar items are unusable.
> 
>      Unlike VirtManager and VirtualBox, which have menu buttons to send
>      Ctl-Alt-Fn and Ctl-Alt-DELete input to the VM, the OVirt button
>      can only send Ctl-Alt-DELete, so there is no way to select
>      alternate consoles that are supported by most operating systems.
> 
>      With another VM installed on virt-manager/QEMU on Ubuntu 20.04,
>      there were no such icon selection problems, and I was able to
>      reconfigure that system for static IPv4 addressing.
> 
>      If someone knows what program is started by clicking on the
>      network menubar icon, please report it; I've never had much
>      success with manual changes to files in the /etc/ tree on Solaris
>      family systems to switch between DHCP-assigned and static IP
>      addresses.
> 
> (2) During the installation, I selected Denver, CO, USA, from the
>      world map, and it definitely showed that choice in the text bar
>      under the map.  However, when the system rebooted, the timezone
>      was still UTC, the clock was off by hours, and /etc/localtime did
>      not exist.  The OVirt control panel shows the clock should be a
>      hardware clock set to "(GMT-00:00) GMT Standard Time".  I fixed
>      that problem by
> 
> 	# ln -s /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/America/Denver /etc/localtime
> 	# ntpdate time1.google.com
> 
> After fixing those issues, creating users accounts (more snapshots), I
> ran
> 
> 	# pkg install build-essential
> 	# pkg update
> 	# sync
> 	# sync
> 	# poweroff
> 
> I made another OVirt snapshot, powered on, and the system is now ready
> for use.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
> - University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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