i440fx support

[therealjrd]

I'm trying to resurrect some old VMs. They use i440fx chipset emulation. When I try to start them with my modern libvirt/qemu, I get an error that that chipset is not supported.

I turned on a bunch of use flags for qemu, including

qemu_softmmu_targets_i386
qemu_softmmu_targets_x86_64
qemu_user_targets_i386
qemu_user_targets_x86_64

I figured those ought to include that support, but not dice.

What should I enable to boot old VMs using that chipset definition?

Thanks in advance . . . .

[pingtoo]

have you tried with "--machine pc" qemu command line option? or

Code: Select all

qemu-system-x86_64 -machine help
# or 
qemu-system-i386 -machine help

to see what machine type your qemu support?

[therealjrd]

Huh. Using those commands (thanks, didn't know about those) I do get a lot of pc-i440fx variants. But, my VMs are using pc-i440fx-2.11, which is not included. It looks like the oldest I have support for is pc-i440fx-5.0. I expect the older ones have just been deprecated.

It probably wouldn't work to edit the xml and change that to something I do have support for, right?

It's not the end of the world if I can't breath life back into these things. It would save me some time, but if I go too deep screwing around with it, I'm likely to just end up wasting more time.

[Hu]

If the chipset was removed from qemu, then you cannot get qemu to emulate it. However, unless the virtual machine is using an extremely specialized kernel, or a Windows install that requires reactivation if you breath on it wrong, changing the emulated chipset is likely to be fine. If you're concerned, start the guest with -snapshot active so that it cannot save any changes. If the guest seems to accept the newer chipset, shutdown the guest, remove -snapshot, and start it again.

[therealjrd]

Nah, this is an extremely vanilla VM, running a roughly 6 year old gentoo installation. I can't believe there's anything about it that cares to that level of detail.

I've got a couple of images I don't care about. I can try editting one of those and see if it works.

Thanks!