Earlier I wrote about Hyper-V crashing with BSOD. The entire project was doomed from the beginning. After I managed get the Windows not to crash, all I managed to do is get the Linux installer to hang whenever it attempted to anything major on the hard drive. I configured Hyper-V to provide the hard drive from a .vhdx-file, so I initially suspected that old .vhd-file might help, but no, nothing helped. Any minor operations succeeded, but any sort of normal usage made the Linux to hang.
Symptoms include:
- Console message: "INFO: task jbd2/sda blocked for more than 120 seconds" and instruction to deactivate the warning with:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs
Example:
- Repeated "Sense Key" -messages in dmesg, example:
- No change in /sys/block/sda/stat:
I was puzzled about this for a very long time. It took me several hours to bump into Linux-SCSI mailing list's discussion about the issue. There Mr. Olaf Hering describes an issue "storvsc loops with No Sense messages".
Luckily Mr. Hering realized what's going on and made a patch to fix the problem. Unfortunately the fix is not yet pushed into mainstream Linux kernel.
Since I was about to install ArchLinux, I took the trouble of compiling the necessary kernel module of hv_storvsc.ko into following kernel versions:
- 3.8.4, used in installation ISO-image:
- SHA-1 sum: 74d2a5de73a4c7d963b649eb34b171eba86a268c
- 3.8.6, the version that got installed when I got my install done:
- SHA-1 sum: 57a4216fc6749085820703d47cd87dcce47b1739
- 3.8.7, the version that it upgraded into when I did a system update:
- SHA-1 sum: 3f8757ab69c97a6389c7c83a8ef57f16e9caa85d
All of the packages are available for you to download at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/ArchLinux/2013.04.01/. Your only trick is to get them replaced into initial RAM-disk -image. I just replaced the original file at /usr/lib/modules and re-ran the mkinitrd-command.
