"No zIPL section in IPL2 record" error when emulating Debian 10.5.0 on s390x

[Ahmed Karaman]

Hi,

I want to emulate Debian 10.5.0 for the s390x architecture on an Ubuntu x86_64 host.

The Debian image is downloaded from the following link:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/s390x/iso-cd/debian-10.5.0-s390x-netinst.iso

Using the latest QEMU version 5.1.0, the Debian image is emulated using the given command:
qemu-system-s390x -boot d -m 4096 -hda debian.qcow -cdrom debian-10.5.0-s390x-netinst.iso -nographic

Running the command causes the output below:

    LOADPARM=[ ]
    Using virtio-blk.
    Using guessed DASD geometry.
    Using ECKD scheme (block size 4096), CDL

    ! No zIPL section in IPL2 record. !

Using exactly the same qemu command above with the Alpine 3.12 image for s390x ran successfully without any errors.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

As far as I know, the Debian CD ISO images are not bootable on s390x (they do not contain boot information according to the El-Torrito standard). Please open a bug against Debian instead if you want to have that changed. So far, you have to boot here manually instead (see http://people.redhat.com/~thuth/blog/qemu/2017/12/19/install-fedora.html for some more information).

[Bruno Haible (bruno-clisp)]

Yes. For booting Debian images using QEMU (<= 5.0.0) I use this recipe:

machine_args="-M s390-ccw-virtio -m 512"
disk_args="-drive file=debian86.img,if=none,format=raw,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-ccw,drive=hd0"
net_args=""
display_args="-display gtk -monitor stdio"
common_args="$machine_args $disk_args $net_args $display_args"

Pull kernel and initrd from the ftp server:
mkdir boot-for-install
(cd boot-for-install
 wget ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/pub/debian/dists/jessie/main/installer-s390x/current/images/generic/kernel.debian
 wget ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/pub/debian/dists/jessie/main/installer-s390x/current/images/generic/initrd.debian)

Then, for running the installer:
qemu-system-s390x $common_args -kernel boot-for-install/kernel.debian -initrd boot-for-install/initrd.debian

For booting from disk:
qemu-system-s390x $common_args -kernel boot/vmlinuz -initrd boot/initrd.img -append "root=/dev/vda2"