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QEMU v4.0.0 released

qemu.org

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Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#21

Post by vero2 »

chousuke wrote: post #16
idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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.

We have several windows vms running in virtualbox. All have rdp/vnc for specialised programs. (These are offline).

Everytime I tried to migrate to qemu or virt-manager or gnome-boxes it was a real nightmare especially installing SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking. I read in Phoronix the performance of virtualbox is subpar and all KVM/qemu is the way to go.

Please, could the OSS community build a easy to use GUI that SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking is made simple. Any one from qemu, I really appreciate the work but still very challenging for sysadmins.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#23

Post by babuskov »

BossingAround wrote: post #19
idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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…

> What are your painpoints in particular?

I believe his pain point is that with Virtual Box you get a very simple GUI where you can get VM up and running very quickly without having to use Google or read any guides at all.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#24

Post by kashyapc »

founderling wrote: post #2

Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?

QEMU is one of the core building blocks for many of the KVM-based data center virtualization and infrastructure projects (e.g. OpenStack, oVirt, KubeVirt, etc). And is used by a wide variety of other projects for various use cases (e.g. `systemd` upstream uses QEMU to speed-up development/testing).

When you launch a KVM-based guest, most often you would see QEMU doing the major user space heavy-lifting by providing a PC-like environment—it handles guest memory management, network cards, emulated storage devices, and so forth. QEMU also has a robust Block Layer; not to mention its versatile, and widely-used, native disk image format, QCOW2.

PS: I am biased, as I work with QEMU on a daily basis :-)

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#25

Post by kstenerud »

founderling wrote: post #2

Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?

I have a NUC sitting in a closet that I've set up to serve virtual desktops using LXC or libvirt (depending on what features I need, or if it's a Linux or MacOS or Windows guest). I made some scripts to build the various types of virtual environments I need [1], and then connect to them using x2go or Chrome Remote Desktop.

This has really freed me up because I'm no longer tied to a single machine. My home dirs are mounted volumes that are also backed up, so I can tear down and rebuild the environment with a single command (which means that my environments are also deterministic). I can connect to them from anywhere on the planet, using any machine as a client (even my phone or a tablet). My main laptop is now a weaksauce 1080p chromebook that acts as a glorified thin client and web browser.

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#26

Post by revskill »

idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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…

This reminds me of: One clear documentation page is worth thousands hours of man work.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#28

Post by signa11 »

idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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 lack the competence to seriously contribute.

actually, having gone through the process of successfully setting up the vm’s make you eminently suitable to contribute documentation knowledge that is sorely lacking in the online resources you have pointed out.

i am sure it will be greatly appreciated and will get improved upon areas that are missing etc.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#29

Post by qalmakka »

BossingAround wrote: post #19
idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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…

I personally dislike libvirt a lot, and virsh in particular. I think that it's pointlessly complicated and burdensome to use, and that in general the hypervisor-agnosticabstractions provided by libvirt are nullified by the fact that no backend except Qemu really works well, this making them a pointless exercise in futility.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#30

Post by idoubtit »

pm215 wrote: post #20
idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last 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 m…

This is the context I was missing when I switched to QEMU. I had not heard about libvirt. A simple "apt search qemu" had shown a few unsatisfying GUIs, but nothing about other layers above qemu.

I suggest QEMU's documentation could mention libvirt and its user-friendly interfaces.

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