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tlathm

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 103  

Converting Jessie VM to KVM and initrd requirements

We use a Devuan Jessie VM (VMware) and were attempting to convert a copy of it for KVM. We converted it using qemu-img.exe under Windows using the flat VMware VMDK file. The issue we ran into was that initially on boot the main LVM volume group (containing the / file system) couldn't be read at all. From what I've read I'm fairly sure that this is because the initrd of the source VM probably doesn't have the virtio drivers, or something else that's required. In fact, a customer was apparently able to get it to boot by rebuilding the initrd, which supports that, though they weren't actually clear how they did that.

Our /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf currently has the default configuration with MODULES=most. Does anyone have any idea as to a configuration that would end up working for this after that conversion? I'm guessing that it might just be a matter of adding modules to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, which was part of what we had to do to convert to Hyper-V.

Thanks!
Tom

tlathm

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 103  

Re: Converting Jessie VM to KVM and initrd requirements

Figured I'd update this for anyone looking to do this. We got this working by adding the following modules to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then running update-initramfs:

virtio_rng
virtio_console
virtio_balloon
virtio_net
virtio_scsi
virtio_pci
virtio
virtio_ring
virtio_blk
rng_core

The reason we originally ran into trouble doing this was that we had omitted virtio_blk, so the device itself couldn't be accessed during the boot.

Tom