Running OmniosCE on buyvm.net KVM slices

These KVM instances seem to have some sort of Hyper-V support enabled, likely to help customers who want to run Windows.

OmniosCE seems to have some drivers for these devices, but as of omniosce-r151036.iso they panic when trying to attach and so the drivers must be disabled to boot.

In either case below, you should see a message printed to the console confirming that the driver is disabled, and then of course there should be no panic:

NOTICE: driver hv_vmbus disabled

Disabling a driver in OmniOS/Illumos/etc.

boot supports a generic -B prop=value syntax to set properties, and also supports a generic disable-${DRIVER}=true property scheme to disable arbitrary drivers. As a result, setting disable-hv_vmbus=true allows us to disable the problematic driver and avoid the panic.

Disabling temporarily at boot

You’ll likely want to do this to be able to run the installer, e.g., when booting the ISO image.

At the loader, escape to the boot prompt and boot with the following:

boot -B disable-hv_vmbus=true

Disabling permanently after installation

This is helpful for subsequent boots of the installation. Note that /boot/ is captured by boot environments.

Add the following to a new file, /boot/loader.conf.local:

boot-args="-B disable-hv_vmbus=true"