Re: I/O errors in Linux domUs

[Christian Lerrahn <lists%penpal4u.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:05:21 +0200
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:21:08AM +1000, Christian Lerrahn wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I have a setup running where a NetBSD/amd64 dom0 hosts several Linux
> > domUs. All domUs have image files not partitions. So far, this is
> > just a test setup and I'm using images from stacklet.com (formerly
> > jailtime.org). However, I tried the Debian Etch (not available any
> > more) 64 bit, Debian Lenny 64bit and Gentoo 2008.0 64bit and always
> > had problems with I/O errors. While the Etch image ran ok for a
> > while, it started throwing errors when I moved it over to a freshly
> > installed NetBSD 5.0.1 (before it was on an older NetBSD-CURRENT).
> > The other 2 would throw errors either on boot or as soon as I tried
> > to edit a config file. All image files are ext3
> 
> Are you sure these images are not sparse files ? NetBSD doesn't
> support a sparse file as backing store for virtual disks (this
> is a vnd(4) limitation).
> 
> Comparing the outputs of ls -l and du on the image file should tell
> you if it's sparse or not ...
> 

Thanks for the hint. Never thought of that. You were right. While ls
would show me an image of 1GB, du only gives me about 250MB. I'll have
to make a copy that isn't sparse on a Linux system somewhere, I suppose.

Cheers,
Christian