Horrible speed during pfSense install

Blaise

New Member
Nov 20, 2009
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Hi!

I've got Proxmox VE 1.4 installed for testing purposes on this hardware:


  • Athlon II X2 250
  • Asus M4A78-VM
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 500 GB SATA HDD
Installation was succesfull and got Proxmox working, but had some difficulties during install (installation hanged with "kernel alive" message).
After reading some related threads here, I've managed to install it, by using "debug acpi=off".
After install, I had to add "noacpi acpi=off" to the boot line too to get it work.
Then I've created an Ubuntu 9.10 server VM, it works fine.

Now I tried to install pfSense. Uploaded the pfSense 1.2.2 LiveCD/Installation ISO to PVE, created a VM with default settings.
When I start the VM, CPU usage goes up to 98-100% after a few seconds. With VNC console, I see the pfSense boot menu, then it starts to boot very slowly. After about half an hour, all is see is some usual boot lines, but the boot process is still not complete. I've tried turning acpi off in the VM's options, but it didn't help.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
First off I would use pfsense-1.2.3RC3, it's more up to date then 1.2.2.

Also add this line into /boot/loader.conf and reboot, it should help the timing inside the KVM..

hint.apic.0.disabled=1
 
First off I would use pfsense-1.2.3RC3, it's more up to date then 1.2.2.

Also add this line into /boot/loader.conf and reboot, it should help the timing inside the KVM..

hint.apic.0.disabled=1

Thanks for the reply. I've already tried 1.2.3RC3, with the same result.

I've tested some firewall distros on PVE, and noticed that Linux distros are working well (tried and still running Ubuntu 9.10, ZeroShell and IPCop), but m0n0wall and pfSense are both horribly slow and unusable.

One more thing I've noticed, if I start a new VM without a valid ISO file to boot, CPU usage goes up to 98%, though the VM fails to boot of course.
Why is CPU usage so much then?
 
On the contrary, I have multiple pfsense KVM's working wonderfully and without any of the issues you have. I must mention though I am still using Proxmox VE 1.3 (KVM-86) with Intel CPUs.

A friend of mine is using a similar combination (Athlon II X4 620, same chipset), and he is having slowness with his KVM's as well. Not sure if it's related as well, but it seems to be similar symptoms.

Have you tried using PVE 1.3 instead? Install from .iso but do not 'apt-get dist-upgrade', just do 'update' and 'upgrade'.

http://www.proxmox.com/cms_proxmox/cms/upload/bittorrent/proxmox-ve_1.3-4023.iso.torrent

If that's still not working as expected, try upgrading to the pvetest repo.
 
One more thing I've noticed, if I start a new VM without a valid ISO file to boot, CPU usage goes up to 98%, though the VM fails to boot of course.
Why is CPU usage so much then?

Because the bios uses 100% CPU (silly loop code).
 
I've tested some firewall distros on PVE, and noticed that Linux distros are working well (tried and still running Ubuntu 9.10, ZeroShell and IPCop), but m0n0wall and pfSense are both horribly slow and unusable.

One more thing I've noticed, if I start a new VM without a valid ISO file to boot, CPU usage goes up to 98%, though the VM fails to boot of course.
Why is CPU usage so much then?

Could you please, provide basic instructions to run Zeroshell under Proxmox KVM?
I'm thinking of use the CD ISO distribution to start, and configure a little hard disk to keep config&logs. Do you use this approach?
Also is there any way to link a virtual ethx to a physical interface ??

Best Regards

Vicente
 
Hello, I tried to install Zeroshell under KVM but it has many issues. You could not make a vzdump of the machine, it causes zeroshell to turn off. But I successfully made a Proxmox-KVM-Host with 3 pfsense-firewalls with only 1 NIC. I did it through vlan tagging on the host.