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QEMU v4.0.0 released

qemu.org

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Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#51

Post by BossingAround »

babuskov wrote: post #23
BossingAround wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For that, I use 'Virtual Machine Manager' [1], which works for me extremely well, and is available for major distros.

[1] https://virt-manager.org/

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#52

Post by callahad »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #44
rnhmjoj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You use NixOS as your daily operating system? What’s that like?

I've been using it on my personal laptop for the past two months.

There are a lot of rough edges to the desktop experience, but it generally works. And while that's faint praise, I have no current plans to switch back to Fedora (3 years) or Debian (12 years prior to that).

It's comforting to know that my entire base system configuration is declarative, and it's pleasant to not worry about libraries conflicting or unnecessary packages lingering around.

Immediate, ephemeral access to programs via, e.g., `nix-shell -p pdftk` is extremely convenient: they're only available in that shell session, and they (along with their dependencies) get cleaned up the next time you run `nix-collect-garbage`. Super handy.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#53

Post by gattilorenz »

bane wrote: post #34
gattilorenz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainly playing with old operating systems, I'm a retrocomputing enthusiast. While years ago I would mainly use Virtual PC (I do miss its great GUI) and VMWare (and rarely bochs), qemu improved a lot and has (somewhat decent) support for so many more architectures. You can run Solaris for SPARC and Mac Os 9, for example.

I'm interested in your is cases. Do you have any good write-ups for Mac OS 9 and others? I never considered QEMU for those older systems.

Well, usually the internet is large and you can find lots of guides :)

I'm an avid follower of virtuallyfun.com and right now the latest post is about installing AIX on QEMU. If you look into the qemu category ( https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/category/qemu/ ) you'll find OS X Server, Unixware and more.

The author, neozeed, is very friendly and you can leave him comments or shoot him an email and he usually answers pretty in depth.

As for OS 9, I'm not sure it is as refined and functional as SheepShaver on Windows yet, but I'm on OS X, where SheepShaver takes more effort to set up. There's a modified QEMU for enhanced OS 9 compatibility (I think more G3 emulation?) here, and people managed to install 9.2: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9028

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#54

Post by usernam33 »

founderling wrote: post #2

Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?

Running linux as Host and optionally starting my gaming vm. With KVM and various hardware passthroughs (pci network card, usb devices, gpu, etc.) it is as fast a native installation and sometimes even faster compared to my old bloated windows host. Ofcourse it was not easy to setup and some games needed tweaking (e.g. Just Cause 2 wanted to use unsupported cpu features and therefore needed an extra flag). But if one has the time and patience this is awesome.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#56

Post by aasasd »

vero2 wrote: post #21
chousuke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SP…

Virt-manager seems to be written in Python. So if libvirt supports the bits you want then with some tinkering in GTK you might be able to bolt the controls onto Virt-manager, at least to get things started.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#57

Post by scbrg »

PudgePacket wrote: post #50
scbrg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any hints on how to set up a similar system? Links, guides, gotchas, whatnot? I've seen someone mention this setup before (perhaps it was you?) and I'm sure I'm not the only one interested in running something similar.

You might be able to find some info here https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ .

This seems very helpful, yes. Thanks a bunch for posting!

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#58

Post by usernam33 »

scbrg wrote: post #43
1125 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using it in conjunction with PCI passthrough instead of dual boot. I've been running Windows 10 for more than a year now and played all kinds of AAA titles successfully. The performance-loss seems minimal. Recently I managed to get a second GPU and spin up another VM, so now me and my partner can play on the same machine, heaving each a keyboard, mouse and screen.

Do you have any hints on how to set up a similar system? Links, guides, gotchas, whatnot? I've seen someone mention this setup before (perhaps it was you?) and I'm sure I'm not the only one interested in running something similar.

I have written a "guide" for myself to replicate my setup. It is by no means perfect, but maybe it helps: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1678554

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#59

Post by usernam33 »

Aardwolf wrote: post #22

It's pretty great and has been useful for many use cases for me, except too bad it lacks good 3D graphics support for modern gaming

There will always be a performance loss unless you go the extra mile and passthrough the gpu. It already works great, but is not a breeze to set up.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#60

Post by jezze »

qalmakka wrote: post #29
BossingAround wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you whole-heartedly. Instead of running one simple qemu command for each vm you instead have hundreds of lines of xml split into many different files. Files you need to run through libvirts session manager that needs to implements its own pretty pointless state management (this could be handled by systemd instead). If there is a nice feature in qemu you want to use, not only do you need to know how to define it in libvirts xml, it might not even be supported at all.
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