I need to test a program on SmartOS. I don't have any spare systems lying around so I wanted to install it into a KVM image on my GNU/Linux distribution. I've installed Solaris 11 that way and that worked pretty well.
I downloaded the ISO and booted it inside KVM and the installation appeared to work fine. However when I boot the virtual machine it always starts to come up and says:
Booting from harddisk ...
and then it just sits there, with the virtual CPU pegged, and never proceeds any further. No key presses appear to do anything (except Ctrl-Alt-Del which starts the boot again, giving the same result).
I created my KVM from virt-manager with 2G RAM, 2 CPUs, 50G of disk space using a "raw" disk format, and selected "Solaris" / "OpenSolaris" as the OS type.
I don't have a copy of VMWare and it seems really expensive to get one for Linux, so I don't think using the SmartOS VMWare image is an option for me.
Anyone have any hints? Google shows me lots of information about creating Linux instances inside SmartOS KVMs, but nothing on doing it the other way.
I figured it out with some help from the mailing list. SmartOS is a PXE booting operating system: it doesn't actually install to the harddisk. When my installation was complete and the VM rebooted KVM automatically unmounted the ISO file from my virtual CDROM, so on boot it was looking for a PXE image to boot from and couldn't find it.
All I had to do was re-attach the ISO file to the virtual CDROM and it worked fine after that. Ugh.