vmdk to live cd - VMware vmxnet virtual NIC driver Kernel panic
- by ronalchn
Task
I am trying to convert a virtual machine to a live CD. Specifically, the virtual machine I am trying to convert is the IOI 2013 Competition Environment. In this task, I am aided by a guide Converting a virtual disk image: VDI or VMDK to an ISO you can distribute.
Symptoms
However, after getting through all the instructions, the live CD causes a kernel panic on boot on bare metal. In particular, the screen shows:
[0.737348] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[0.737503] sr 3:0:0:0: >Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[0.737638] sr 3:0:0:0: >Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
[0.737771] Freeing unused kernel memory: 756k freed
[0.738093] Write protecting the kernel text: 5960k
[0.738155] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 2424k
[0.738224] NX-protecting the kernel data: 4280k
Loading, please wait...
[0.752252] udevd[100]: starting version 175
[0.768708] VMware vmxnet3 virtual NIC driver - version 1.1.29.0-k-NAPI
[0.781204] VMware PVSCSI driver - version 1.0.2.0-k
[0.789555] VMware vmxnet virtual NIC driver
[0.799356] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000200
[0.799356]
[0.799472] Pid: 1, comm: init Tainted: G 0 3.5.0-17-generic #28-Ubuntu
[0.799549] Call Trace:
[0.799603] [<c15bf0ec>] panic+0x81/0x17b
[0.799654] [<c104a6a5>] do_exit+0x745/0x7a0
[0.799707] [<c104a9a4>] do_group_exit+0x34/0xa0
[0.799760] [<c104aa28>] sys_exit_group+0x18/0x20
[0.799813] [<c15cff5f>] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x28
Possible problem
I suspect that the problem is the VMware vmxnet virtual NIC driver - however, I do not know how I can uninstall it, and possibly install one for a bare metal machine. If anyone knows which packages needs installing/uninstalling at the .rootfs/ chroot directory stage, please let me know.
Details on procedure
Do note that after importing the .ova file into Virtualbox, the virtual machine is stored as a .vmdk file already, and not a .vdi file.
I would like to point out some results of the procedure followed in case of any questions. This is after extracting the filesystem from the .raw file to the .rootfs/ directory mentioned in the blog. I changed the filesystem table as mentioned in the blog, then looked at the possible "kernel optimized for virtualization".
However, I found that linux-image-generic was already installed. Also, when running the command dpkg-query --showformat='${Package}\n' -W 'vmware-tools*' (or dpkg-query --showformat='${Package}\n' -W '*-virtual'), no packages were found.
Thus, I did not find any virtualization specific packages. I proceeded to generate the iso following the steps in the blog, and burned it to a DVD.
