virtualbox.org

Hi all; I have a homegrown Linux distro that I use with PXE to netboot. It runs a 2.6.31-based kernel, and it's a 64bit architecture. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and, probably, RHEL5 as host systems.

I'd like to use VirtualBox (or some virtualization solution) for testing etc. I've gotten the system to PXE boot properly using one of the default network interface types, but I was hoping to get a speed boost by using virtio.

First, it's not clear to me what Linux kernel parameters I need to have set on the guest in order to use virtio (both network and block layer). The kernel config help is really not very specific about which parameters should be enabled on the HOST vs. the GUEST. I hand-tune my kernel in my bootable image to remove anything I don't need. When I try to enable virtio-net it doesn't want to enable it; looking at the Kconfig settings is _appears_ as though virtio-net is not available for 64bit kernels... does anyone know if that's true, and if it's not true how to turn it on?

I did get the system to boot by replacing the default boot rom (which doesn't support PXE over virtio-net) with a gPXE ROM that does support it and it was able to basically boot (it downloaded the host's pxelinux.0 but got stuck trying to download the PXE default.cfg file... I'll have to look more into that but it doesn't seem worthwhile if I can't get virtio-net working in my guest kernel anyway).

Thanks for any help/tips/advice anyone may have!

Hi,

_appears_ as though virtio-net is not available for 64bit kernels... does anyone know if that's true, and if it's not true how to turn it on?

as a module, or ...=y if you want compiled into the kernel ...

Heh. Well, sure. But have you actually tried this? When I try it via menuconfig that option doesn't show up, and when I edit the .config file directly then run "make oldconfig" that option is removed again.

Ah, wait, I see. I need to have CONFIG_VIRTIO_PCI set first before any of this can work. Once I set that everything is fine.

Doh. Thanks!