PVE 4.x: Adding virtio controller causes VM cpu spike

[cosmos]

Hello all,

I salvaged a broken physical system and created first a 4.1 PVE node and then a XP VM in it. For the latter I simply used the existing actual hard disk of the broken system. It booted perfectly from the start, even though no mergeide took place. In fact I expected hell to break loose. Did not happen thankfully

Anyways, after adding the ballon driver and a virtio net driver I wanted to convert the ide disk to virtio. I added a single virtio disk, to have the xp ask for new drivers etc. This is where it started going strange. System boot with the virtio controller took ages, during that time cpu was at 100%.

Once logged in I tried adding the virtio driver. Installation got stuck. After rebooting it took the system ages. I had to forcefully stop the VM. Removing the virtio controller altogether made the system operate normally. Readding it, caused cpu spike and huge delays in everything.

Any ideas what might be wrong here? The node is a plain Core i5 system with VT extensions...

EDIT: The XM VP has SP2 and not SP3. Perhaps this is relevant to the situation here. I would like to avoid changing the SP level though since it might break the monolithic services hosted.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Anyways, after adding the ballon driver and a virtio net driver I wanted to convert the ide disk to virtio. I added a single virtio disk, to have the xp ask for new drivers etc. This is where it started going strange. System boot with the virtio controller took ages, during that time cpu was at 100%.

Once logged in I tried adding the virtio driver. Installation got stuck. After rebooting it took the system ages. I had to forcefully stop the VM. Removing the virtio controller altogether made the system operate normally. Readding it, caused cpu spike and huge delays in everything.

Did you used the "quasi official ones from" https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Windows_Virtio_Drivers#ISO_contents i.e. mounted the iso in a ide cdrom drive and installed the viostore driver for XP?

 

[cosmos]

I used https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso on this VM, as I have done with success in other Windows XP/7 VMs.

Like I said, the main difference here is that this XP box is on SP2. I am not aware if SP3 is a requirement. I'll take a VM backup, throw in SP3 and test. If that does not fix it, I don't have the faintest clue what would.

 

[cosmos]

Installed SP3; same deal.

I'll leave the VM running with the IDE controller I presume...

 

[t.lamprecht]

You could also try older VIRTIO drivers,as if I recall correctly older windows systems like XP/ server 2003 may have problems with the newer driver, may be worth a try.

 

[cosmos]

Installed older driver, same issue unfortunately. Will keep going to older versions...