Booting an ISO image

There have been earlier discussions[1][2] about booting ISO images, and it has been indicated that now with the switch to KVM this should be possible.

So I decided to start an experiment with Finnix, since it’s a small live disc which is already known to work with Linode.

The steps I have taken, so anyone interested can follow along:

* Deployed a standard Linode Ubuntu 16.04 image

• Created a 160 MB raw disk

• Attached the newly created disk in the configuration profile as /dev/sdc

• Rebooted

• Logged in and ran

  curl -OL http://www.finnix.org/releases/111/finnix-111.iso
  dd if=finnix-111.iso of=/dev/sdc
  

• Created a new configuration profile, chose full virtualization, selected direct disk booting, and attached the raw disk as /dev/sda

• Rebooted using the new profile

Now, observing the console, at first Finnix seems to boot fine, however, at the end the console looks garbled and nothing gets displayed on input. A screenshot is available here: https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/1VnOmTYU.png

Is there anything else I should do to boot from an ISO?

[1] https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3901

[2] https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11840