[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI-hipster-gui-20210430.iso progress report on 3 virtualization system

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I've now made installation attempts with the
OI-hipster-gui-20210430.iso image on these three virtualization
systems:

	* CentoS 7.9    virt-manager/QEMU
	* Ubuntu 20.04  virt-manager/QEMU
	* Ubuntu 20.04  VirtualBox

Each VM is given 4GB DRAM, 4 CPUs, and 80GB disk; the latter is not
partitioned, so ZFS uses the entire disk.  The disk image file is
newly created, and so should have nothing but zero blocks.

On all three, the GUI installer worked as expected, and I selected a
time zone (America/Denver), created one ordinary user account, and
supplied a root password.  Installation completed normally, and the
systems rebooted.

On the CentOS-based VM, the one on which I reported boot problems
before, after the system rebooted, I logged in, used the network GUI
tool to change to static IPv4 addressing, made one ZFS snapshot, ran
"sync" (twice) then "poweroff", then took a virt-manager snapshot.  On
the next reboot, I again got a similar problem to what I reported
previously.

	ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
	ZFS: failed to read pool rpool directory object

On the Ubuntu virt-manager VM, reboots are problem free, and the VM is
fully configured with a large number of installed packages, and is
working nicely as part of our test farm.

The Ubuntu VirtualBox VM built normally. and rebooted normally, so I
took a ZFS snapshot, rebooted, and started to install packages: it
seems normal so far.

I'm not going to spend time trying to resurrect the VM on CentOS 7,
but I'm still willing to try building on that system additional VMs
from newer ISO releases for OpenIndiana Hipster.

One might be inclined to consider the CentOS-based VM as an example of
failure, or bugs, inside the host O/S, or inside QEMU, or perhaps even
the physical workstation (a 2015-vintage HP Z440 with 128GB DRAM, and
several TB of disk storage, both EXT4 and ZFS).  However, that machine
runs 80 to 100 simultaneous VMs with other O/Ses, and has been rock
solid in its almost six years of service.  That would tend to
exonerate the hardware, and virt-manager/QEMU, suggesting that
something inside OpenIndiana is causing the problem.  However, the
success of two other VMs from the same ISO image indicates that
OpenIndiana is solid.

My workstation is essentially one-of-a-kind, so there is no way for me
to see whether an apparently identical box from the same vendor would
also experience failure of an OpenIndiana VM.


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- 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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