Updating My RPM Fusion Builder

I am running one of the RPM Fusion builders in a VM using CentOS and after I saw that the newly created VMs on my notebook are using virtio for network and disk access I thought that I will try this also for my builder VM. It was pretty easy and straight forward.

First I had to update from CentOS 5.2 to CentOS 5.4 so that the virtio drivers are available. After that I was just following http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio.

For the network:

• shut down the VM
• edit the XML and add <model type='virtio'/> to the network section
• start the VM
• done

For the disk:

• create a new ramdisk with the virtio drivers: mkinitrd --with virtio_pci --with virtio_blk -f /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
• or dracut -f --add-drivers "virtio_pci virtio_blk" /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r) for Fedora 12
• change /boot/grub/device.map from “(hd0) /dev/hda” to “(hd0) /dev/vda“
• using LVM requires no changes to the root= parameter in /etc/grub.conf
• shut down the VM
• edit the XML changing <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/> to <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
• start the VM
• done

During the boot of the VM I can now see that it is loading the virtio disk drivers and detecting vda1 and vda2. Using lspci and lsmod I can also verify that the new virtio devices are available and also used. The VM seems to be faster but I have not actually benchmarked it.