Linux Kernel Contributors

Consistent with what I found in my research for my undergraduate economics thesis, "A Theoretical Analysis of the Efficiencies of Software Development Models," virtualization.info cites Citrix and VMWare as being ranked as the #12 and #20 (respectively) contributors to the newest Linux Kernel (2.6.34). Although this may seem initially counterintuitive that two proprietary software development firms are such large contributors to open source software, it is consistent with my research findings that the largest contributors to open source software communities are in fact private, for-profit industry firms.

openSUSE on KVM

Most recent guest OS on my RHEL KVM/Qemu setup:






OpenSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3. Initial impression is that KDE is pretty slick, but quite different from what I'm used to, back the days of KDE 2 and 3. In terms of usability, it definitely has a learning curve. I'm definitely partial to the simple elegance of Gnome, but I intend to play a bit more with OpenSUSE and KDE.

Creating ISO images from a Directory

Recently at work, we had a need to transfer Citrix XenDesktop installation files into our VSphere 4 lab environment, however our ESX servers did not support USB, as the hypervisor did not have usb-storage.ko, uhci-hcd.ko, or ehci-hcd.ko modules compiled and we didn't have time to compile and load them into the kernel.

From our VSphere console, we can only mount ISOs and we can't drag and drop files into the VM, like in VMWare workstation, so the easiest way to get our files into our VMs was to burn an ISO. Fortunately this is pretty easy to do in Linux:

mkisofs -o files.iso -J ./folder

Credit where credit is due, this blog post was extremely helpful.

Playing DVDs on RHEL5

As a consultant, one critical functionality on my laptop is the ability to watch DVDs- as trivial as it sounds, my laptop serves more than just the sole purpose of a work tool. Outside of work, it's my portal to the world, including personal e-mail, online television, and watching movies. Since I'm staying in hotels 4-5 days a week, I don't have the option to go home to my desktop every day after work. My firm understands this, and while the work laptop is primarily for work, the official policy allows us to use our laptops for "limited personal use," which I believe is the right approach- its more of a quality of life factor than anything else.

So after installing RHEL5 as my primary OS and virtualizing my work OS on KVM (whether this falls under "limited personal use" is somewhat murky :-), I needed to ensure that I could still watch movies on the laptop. Unfortunately unlike Ubuntu, Fedora, or Gentoo, RHEL does not have a robust media offering in the standard supported repositories. One reason being that RHEL is really designed for enterprise use, so generally, DVD playback and media handling is unnecessary. Another reason for RHEL's lack of official support for proprietary formats is due to patent and copyright issues- since RedHat markets and sells its OS and accompanying software, it cannot support potentially contentious packages such as libdvdcss.

Nonetheless, RHEL being Linux, I knew that I'd be able to install a DVD playing application, even if installed from source, however I wanted to avoid installing from source if possible simply because of dependency issues and having to write a seamless configuration file with all the right option flags set.

Since RHEL has its Fedora cousin and CentOS brother, I was confident that I could find the appropriate RPMs to install a media player. I also knew that I'd want to install xine, as I really like its simple interface, large support of proprietary and open formats, and I had had good experience with it in Ubuntu.

I began by installing the RHEL officially supported totem package as well as an rpm of libdvdcss. While both installed rather seamlessly, it appeared that totem either couldn't find or couldn't use the libdvdcss plugin. I then tried installing xine from custom packages, but this proved unsuccesfuly with too many unresolved dependencies. After a bit of googling, this Linux Questions forum post directed me to Dag Wieers (Dutch?) repository, which included Dag's custom yum repository with packages created for RHEL5. Once on the site, installation was relatively painless. To create the repository, only one command is necessary:

# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

After that

# yum install xine

The xine package resolved all dependencies and installed cleanly, and sure enough, I can play commercial DVDs with no issues!

Windows 7 Activation Woes

Since getting KVM and QEMU up and running and installing Windows 7 on a virtual disk (a necessary evil if I'm going to use this laptop for work), I ran into some activation woes, with Windows 7 unable to activate the volume media

Windows could not be activated.
Key management services (KMS) host could not be located in domain name system (DNS), please have your system adminstrator verify that a KMS is published correctly in DNS.
Error: 0x80092328
Description:
DNS name does not exist

Unlike the days of my youth and with the help of an MSDN subscription, my media and key is actually legitimate. After a bit of searching, I found KB929826, which outlined how to fix the problem- a simple one line command to be run as administrator:

slmgr -ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

and all issues were solved:

Automounting NTFS drives

As I cited in an earlier post, RHEL 5 still doesn't have native NTFS support. After installing the NTFS support in RHEL 5, I would still have to manually mount my drive every time I plugged it in, after receving the below error:



Not a mission critical problem, more just an annoyance. After a bit of Googling, I found this simple fix to automount the drive:

ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs

And voila- no errors and it automounts like it should in the first place.

Flip the switch from 'Broken' to 'Fixed'

The key to using KVM: ENABLE VIRTUALIZATION IN THE BIOS

In the words of the famous Homer Simpson- "Doh!"
After doing a bit more research and piecing together why I could boot into Windows, but then everything would come to grinding halt, it occured to me to check the BIOS to ensure that virtualization is enabled, as I was continuously getting an error when starting a VM: "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support".

Seeing as my intel processor supports virtualization (egrep vmx --color=always /proc/cpuinfo), why wouldn't KVM start correctly? Furthermore, modprobe kvm-intel wouldn't load correctly.

After a couple of audible, "huh."s it occured to me to check the BIOS on the HP laptop to ensure CPU virtualization was enabled. SURPRISE! It wasn't. After enabling it in the BIOS and booting, and with a little more confidence, I ran into the same problem, "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support." After a bit of Googling, I found that for whatever reason, a full shutdown and cold boot were necessary for the BIOS setting to take effect. Sure enough, after a reboot and starting my VM:


And with the -CDROM option pointing to my Windows 7 ISO, I made it past the infinite "setup is starting" page, and was able to install Windows 7:



As is usually the case, the issues experienced with KVM were due to user error rather than shoddy development.


So some tasks to complete to ensure that my work laptop will actually facilitate work:

• Ensure I can share files between my RHEL host and KVM guests
• Ensure that USB devices can be used on KVM guests
• Provide my work Windows 7 guest with enough disk space to accomodate all of my work documents

After a bit of consideration, I think my best approach will be to keep my guest OS on a different virtual disk image than my documents. That way I can keep a separate non-OS partition with all of my documents on it and boot my virtual disks with the -hdb option, thus allowing me to easily switch from Windows 7 to Windows XP guests.

Some links I found useful or potentially useful:
How to resize a libvirt image
QEMU Monitor Commands
QEMU USB Handling