Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?
i use qemu/kvm almost everyday. i also use qemu-img tools quite often. and as other people have mentioned, building inside qemu is quite convenient, especially with tools like packer.
QEMU v4.0.0 released
11–20 of 168 posts
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#12Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
I have not used it, but Drew Devault had a post explaining how to get started with Qemu : https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/10/Getting-started-with-qemu...
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#13Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
Welcome to the Open Source experience... sadly.
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#14Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
The Gnome Boxes app is excellent
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#15Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
There are several higher level frameworks that wrap QEMU-KVM and make it easier to use. oVirt, libvirt and proxmox are among my favourites, with the latter being quite polished and with advanced features for HA use.
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#16Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
Using QEMU directly is a bit tricky and it's not really intended to be used in that fashion by most users, unlike VirtualBox.
Both gnome-boxes and virt-manager use QEMU under the hood though, and they provide a point-and-click experience. I use virt-manager myself and I do not think it's any more difficult than VirtualBox is.
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#17Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?
I'm on NixOS and QEMU is well integrated in Nix.
You can write a system configuration, generate a QEMU VM and run it. Also all NixOS automatic tests[1] are running in QEMU VMs that are generated from a Nix configuration.
The most beautiful thing is that you can create multiple VMs and run them simultaneously to create a virtual network. For example you can test a client-server application by running the client and the server on two hosts or test some network configuration[2].
[1]: https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-nixos-tests
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/tests/nat...
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#18Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?
I use it to run aarch64 unit test builds on my x86 system. Pretty cool with binfmt support, allowing me to run aarch64 executables just like any other x86 executable: https://wiki.debian.org/QemuUserEmulation
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#19Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
Rather than using QEMU by itself, it might be advisable to use libvirt..? As somewhat of a newbie to virtualization, that's how I started - googling how to use libvirt and virsh, and I found a lot of resources that helped me to deploy what I needed... What are your painpoints in particular? I.e. which topics would you like to explore deeper and can't due to poor documentation/resources? We could work on improving the resources.
Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released
#20Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…
My recommendation for that sort of use would be to look at using a 'management layer' app that sits above QEMU and handles all the fiddly command line details for you -- https://virt-manager.org/ (which uses/is part of libvirt) is a popular one, I think. The QEMU project has kind of settled on the philosophy of being the low-level tool which provides you "full manual control" and interfaces for a higher-level UI to make use of. User-friendliness is not really our forte and so we let other projects provide that part.