The guest needs a driver for whichever option is selected – this is the most common reason to not use the default (e.g., on very old Windows versions).īackend: Controlled via the -display argument. The default these days is qxl which strikes a good balance between guest compatibility and performance. Usually one of cirrus, std, qxl, or virtio. Graphics for QEMU/KVM always comes in two pieces: a front end and a back end.įrontend: Controlled via the -vga argument, which is provided to the guest. So take a look at the QEMU manpage, qemu-img and the QEMU documentation and see which options best suit your needs. But in general, it comes down to: qemu-system-x86_64 options image

They can also be made more consumable for specific use-cases and needs through a vast selection of auxiliary tools - for example virt-manager for UI-driven use through libvirt. These tools can do much more, as you’ll discover in their respective (long) manpages. We can now allocate the space for the VM: qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk.qcow 5GĪnd then we can use the disk space we have just allocated for storage by adding the argument: -drive file=disk.qcow,format=qcow2. sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cdrom ĭownloading the ISO provides for faster access at runtime. This example is just for illustration purposes - it is not generally recommended without verifying the checksums Multipass and UVTool are much better ways to get actual guests easily. You can achieve this by running the following command: While there are more user-friendly and comfortable ways, the quickest way to get started with QEMU is by directly running it from the netboot ISO. libvirt provides an abstraction from specific versions and hypervisors and encapsulates some workarounds and best practices.

In that case it uses the hardware virtualisation technology to virtualise guests.Īlthough QEMU has a command line interface and a monitor to interact with running guests, they are typically only used for development purposes. However, it is more often used as a virtualiser in collaboration with KVM kernel components. QEMU is a machine emulator that can run operating systems and programs for one machine on a different machine.

Multi-node configuration with Docker-Composeĭistributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD)

Qemu guest agent tutorial