boot: 0.915
device: 0.872
graphic: 0.840
other: 0.735
socket: 0.649
semantic: 0.637
vnc: 0.615
instruction: 0.591
mistranslation: 0.544
network: 0.532
KVM: 0.358
assembly: 0.318

4.2 regression: ReactOS crashes on boot

In QEMU 4.1.x and earlier, ReactOS can successfully boot, but starting with 4.2, it fails, instead coming up with an error "The video driver failed to initialize."

This happens regardless of VM configuration (even -M pc-i440fx-4.1) and it works well with older versions of QEMU. bisecting QEMU to find the first bad commit reveals 0221d73ce6a8e075adaa0a35a6ef853d2652b855 as the culprit, which is updating the seabios version; perhaps this bug belongs there, but I don't know the appropriate avenue (it seems seabios is a subproject of QEMU anyway?).

I should add, ReactOS can be downloaded from here: https://reactos.org/download

The LiveCD is sufficient to see the problem.

Possibly related thread:
"Do we need a cpu with TSC support to run SeaBIOS?"
https://<email address hidden>/msg11726.html

The QEMU project is currently considering to move its bug tracking to
another system. For this we need to know which bugs are still valid
and which could be closed already. Thus we are setting older bugs to
"Incomplete" now.

If you still think this bug report here is valid, then please switch
the state back to "New" within the next 60 days, otherwise this report
will be marked as "Expired". Or please mark it as "Fix Released" if
the problem has been solved with a newer version of QEMU already.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience.


[Expired for QEMU because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

This is still a problem with qemu 1:4.2-3ubuntu6.16 on 20.04, and can be reproduced with:

curl -LO https://freefr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/reactos/ReactOS/0.4.13/ReactOS-0.4.13-live.zip
unzip ReactOS-0.4.13-live.zip
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom ReactOS-0.4.13-Live.iso -boot d -usb -device usb-tablet
[Pick "LiveCD" in the boot menu]

Which gives the error shown in the attached screenshot.

I've changed the Status back to New.


This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's
new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now.
Please continue with the discussion here:

 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/475


As a workaround, I have extracted bios.bin and vgabios-stdvga.bin from http://launchpadlibrarian.net/318981898/seabios_1.10.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb, passing -bios bios.bin to qemu and making sure vgabios-stdvga.bin is in the current working directory when running qemu in order for it to be used (seems like there is no command line option for qemu to specify the VGA bios).

@th-huth Aha, thanks!