Unable to access disk image on mipsel host

[Artyom]

Something is wrong with hard disk images on MIPSel host.

The host system is mips64el (Loongson cpu, Linux 2.6.39, eglibc 2.13)
Tried Qemu 0.14.1 and 0.15.0-rc2, both compiled with GCC 4.6.0.

First I was trying to install WinXP (i386-softmmu).
Starting install, create partition, format (either quick and full), seems to complete, boom the error:

"
Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged. Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to your computer. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated. Consult your computer manual or SCSI adapter documentation for more information.

You must select a different partition for Windows XP.
To continue, press ENTER.
"

This happens with both raw and qcow2 image format.
Tried 10Gb image, tried 16Gb one - no difference.

On a x86 host, that formatting makes the image (qcow2) grow to about 81 Mb by the time it reaches 100% formatted (quick), but on mipsel it grows to 0.8Mb at the same time and the error appears.

I tried the same installing of Windows in Qemu on x86 host and copied over the completed image.
In that case it starts loading, but in the middle of the animation there is an error:

"
STOP: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error
\Systemroot\System32\ntdll.dll
"
(or HAL.dll)

So, i tried linux-0.2.img.bz2 from the Qemu site, and that fails too.
Thus it's the minimal bug reproduction thing.

During boot there are multiple errors like:
"
hda: dma_intr: status=0x41 { DriveReady Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: Failed opcode was: unknown
"

It booted and kind of worked, there were weird glitches in every program.
Unusable.

Summarily, that suggest some error in hard disk emulation or back storage, specific either to MIPSel or non-x86 hosts.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Triaging old bug tickets ... can you still reproduce this problem with the latest version of QEMU (currently v2.9.0)?

[Artyom (theartlav)]

Well, that's a blast from the past.
Still have the MIPS laptop in question (Lemote Yeeloong 8101b), got it running.

Built Qemu 0.14.1, the bug is replicated as before.
Built Qemu 2.9.0, the bug is still replicated as before (but qemu is now about 100x slower for some reason).

So it would appear that whatever the problem is, it never got solved in the last 5 years.

Raw image (linux-0.2.img.bz2), can't quite test on WinXP any more since it's awfully slow.
Still gives the same kinds of errors:
hda: dma_intr: status=0x41 { DriveReady Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: Failed opcode was: unknown

Built with ./configure --target-list=i386-softmmu

Triage-wise, both the laptop, the company and the CPU architecture lost the test of time and are at best collector's items these days, so unless the bug can be replicated on some modern MIPS system it's not worth bothering with.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for QEMU because there has been no activity for 60 days.]