KVM with Spice USB Redirection on Fedora 16

After some initial trouble I managed to get Windows 7 32bit working in KVM on Fedora 16 on my Thinkpad T410s.  For the most part it works except for a strange issue where hardware virt works only *once*.  If I shutdown the guest, I need to reboot the laptop for hardware virt to work again.  I then struggled to use USB storage devices in the Windows guest as is often required in school.  It turns out that the USB passthrough in virt-manager is only capable of USB 1.0 and is ultimately unusable due to its fragility.  PCI passthrough for my sdio slot did not work either.

Windows 7 KVM guest with Spice USB Redirection on Fedora 16 host

Fortunately, Spice's USB network redirection seems to work great.  virt-manager is not capable of configuring or using it directly, but following these directions and using the spicy client, I managed to redirect USB 2.0 devices to my KVM guest.  It even has an option to automatically redirect newly plugged devices, and it does so intelligently to the host or guest depending which window has keyboard focus at that moment.

spicy client seems better than spicec or virt-manager, although Shift-F11 to escape full screen mode seems to be broken.  Until this bug is fixed, a temporary workaround is to CTRL-ALT-F2 and kill spicy in order to escape.  UPDATE: It seems Shift-F11 fails to both enter and exit full screen mode.  Full screen can only be entered from the View menu of spicy.  However Shift-F12 to ungrab the mouse does successfully escape from full screen spicy.

Windows 7 KVM Trouble on Fedora 16

For the past school year I have been forced to use Windows for various proprietary applications that we are required to use in MBA school. =(  I have been running Fedora within VMWare Player within Windows 7 on my Thinkpad T410s.  Today I wiped my laptop, installed Fedora 16, and I am attempting to install a KVM guest of Windows 7 x64 from an ISO image using these instructions.  Unfortunately, shortly after the ISO boots in KVM it fails with this BSOD.

 
A quick Google search reveals seemingly nothing related to KVM.  On a hunch, I ran the qemu-kvm command that libvirt launched, and it printed this error message: KVM not supported for this target

There were some Fedora 15 era bugs with this error, but nothing more recent.  BIOS has Virtualization enabled, and lsmod shows kvm and kvm_intel loaded.  After reloading kvm_intel, I see this kmsg:
kvm: VM_EXIT_LOAD_IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL does not work properly. Using workaround

Oddly enough, the previous KVM not supported for this target message no longer happens.  This however has no effect on the BSOD.

Has anyone successfully installed Windows 7 in Fedora 16 KVM?

UPDATE: Windows 7 x64 install worked in kvm on RHEL6 on a different machine.  For some reason, only Windows 7 x32 works on my Thinkpad T410s with Fedora 16 x86_64.  Makes no sense...

How to fix Android Chrome on CM9

Today Google pushed an update for Android Chrome Beta that broke its ability to run on many CM9 Android 4.0.3 devices.  It says "Chrome is not supported for your version of Android.  Version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is the minimal supported version."

The procedure to manually fix Chrome Beta on your CM9 device is beyond the break.

How to build Android on RHEL6 or Fedora

Google's instructions of how to build Android only detail how to setup your build environment on Ubuntu.  This post describes how to do the equivalent on RHEL6, CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6 or Fedora 16+.

CM9 Android 4.0.3 for Samsung Epic 4G

Our team released a mostly feature complete Android 4.0.3 build for the Samsung Epic 4G on the Sprint network.  See the Epic CM team blog for more details.

Tools: repoclone, reporeset, repohardlink

I wrote tools repoclone, reporeset and repohardlink to copy and use multiple Android repos in parallel.  By using hardlinks in a git-native manner it clones repos much faster and saves a lot of storage.  [Documentation] [Git]

Hawaii Android Automatic Time Zone Bug

This post describes the automatic timezone setting bug that affects Hawaii and many other locations around the globe.  Included below are temporary and permanent workarounds to avoid this issue for existing phones in Hawaii.  I also discuss the proposed location-aware automatic timezone selector that has the greatest chance of fixing this for good for all timezones.

Android on Samsung Epic 4G Development Notes

This post contains notes relevant to the development of custom Android firmware for the Samsung Epic 4G on the Sprint network.  Our goal is to make Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" fully supported on this phone.  This content has been moved to a dedicated blog here.

Cartoon - The Starbucks Experience

Yesterday our MBA marketing team presented our Marketing Plan recommendations to a local business owner.  Part of the presentation was to explain modern marketing concepts including the customer experience and focus on the Job the customer is trying to do.  A frequently cited example is Starbucks.  Apparently McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts beat Starbucks in blind taste tests, yet the general public believes Starbucks to be of premium quality.  Starbucks' success ultimately is not from selling coffee, but rather the overall café experience.  The customer merely is renting space (their third place) as an escape from home or work.

Thanks to Fedora Project's Máirín Duffy for her cartoon that helped tremendously in conveying this concept.  Our Professor liked it very much and suggested publishing it for use in marketing academia.  Thus she decided to release it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.  Thanks Mo!

(I now find myself sitting in Starbucks, renting space, as I write this blog entry.)

Surprise - ISAS uses Linux

A few days ago I took the International Survey of Adult Skills after my home address was randomly selected to participate.  They apparently want to determine relative levels of education and computer-use skills across households in 25 countries by using a random statistical sample.

The survey taker had a government issued laptop to administer the test.  It was a large, no-brand name laptop running Windows Vista Basic.  After booting into Windows, they run some app that tracks the with the test takers' home addresses, then launches the test.  To my surprise, the test itself is within a VMWare Player virtual machine.  It booted what looked like some stripped down variant of Debian, then directly into X and the test interface.

The test itself was fairly well designed... obviously some real thought was put into it.  It tests your ability to use a basic e-mail client, spreadsheet and understand search engine results.  Some tests were reading data from a spreadsheet or chart and calculating answers with a calculator.  Some were reading e-mail and inputting values into a spreadsheet.

The test did have some problems.

• Software bugs ... often clicking would fail to work.  You would need to figure out workarounds, often involving clicking away then re-entering a part of the UI, to make it work as intended.  These bugs often made it frustrating to participate, and probably made me take 25% longer to complete the test.  I can see this screwing up their end results as some test takers may just give up due to bugs rather than demonstrate skills that they know.
• I noticed several instances where the on-screen instructions had typos, ambiguously written instructions, or ambiguous text to read and interpret in order to understand the goal of a particular test.  This made me wonder if the ambiguity combined with software bugs were INCLUDED INTENTIONALLY as a means to test real-world problem solving skills.  If so, this might be a clever design.
• But then I noticed another problem that surely cannot be intended.  The survey taker said it is supposed to be administered identically and in English in the 25 countries.  I saw several things in the test that were obviously American-centric, and I highly doubt they will be able to successfully test in 25 countries in English.
• The survey administrator complained that the laptops were EXTREMELY SLOW and often the VMWare Player would get stuck during shutdown, preventing her from collecting the results and moving on.

It was surprising that this government study used Linux for the test interface.  It seems clear that they used Linux as a method of deploying many identical copies of the survey interface across the world at the lowest cost possible.  It is strange that they would use Linux within Windows, when Windows seemed to be the cause of the extreme slowness.  Between Windows bootup and lots of time wasted fighting the test UI, it seems we wasted ~45 minutes.  That kind of time wasted can really add up to big money when multiplied across many thousands of test takers.  As a whole it seems well thought out, but they could have made the overall program far more effective had they fixed a few of these annoying and time consuming bugs.

Moved Blog from Livejournal

http://wtogami.livejournal.com/
See my older blog entries at Livejournal.