Thursday, July 29, 2010

Running RHEL 5 as a Guest Under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

I recently tried to run RHEL5 as guest under Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid and my experiment ended with weird messages like shown below. It just popped up during running kvm and there were no way to fix it but start qemu without kvm. It helped but was so slow that almost unusable unless you have plenty of time to wait.
MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
After several attempts to fix it and get working RHEL5 for testing I found this post which has several options that works for test instance of RHEL5. It turned out simple kvm options like
-no-kvm-irqchip
-no-kvm-pit.    
can be used to make it boots like expected and it still works pretty fast versus -nokvm option.