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Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

github.com

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Re: Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

#6

Post by kxrm »

yoyoinbog wrote: post #3

Looks interesting but would someone be so kind to point out if there are any advantages for a guy like me who just runs win 11 in VirtualBox under Ubuntu from time to time?

Hard to answer this question as it largely depends on what you are doing with your VM. This appears to be a wrapper for QEMU and tries to pick reasonable settings to make spinning up new VMs easier.

Re: Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

#7

Post by spongebobstoes »

mihalycsaba wrote: post #5

It's a QEMU wrapper. I don't know how is this useful. It might save you 2 minutes. Maybe more with windows 11 because of tpm.

Looks like this tries to use better default settings for qemu, which doesn't always have good defaults.

I think that is useful practically, as a learning tool, and as a repository of recommended settings.

Re: Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

#8

Post by acatton »

Just a security reminder from the last time this got posted[1]

This tool downloads random files from the internet, and check their checksum against other random files from the internet. [2]

This is not the best security practice. (The right security practice would be to have the gpg keys of the distro developers committed in the repository, and checking all files against these keys)

This is not downplaying the effort which was put in this project to find the correct flags to pass to QEMU to boot all of these.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797129

[2] https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu/blob/0c8e1a5205...

Re: Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

#9

Post by steve_rambo »

libvirt ships with virt-install which also allows for quickly creating and auto-installing Windows and many Linux distributions. I haven't tried it with mac.

Here's a recent example with Alma Linux:

  $ virt-install --name alma9 --memory 1536 --vcpus 1 --disk path=$PWD/alma9.img,size=20 --cdrom alma9.iso --unattended
Then you go for a coffee, come back and have a fully installed and working Alma Linux VM. To get the list of supported operating systems (which varies with your version of libvirt), use:

  $ osinfo-query os

Re: Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

#10

Post by overbytecode »

mihalycsaba wrote: post #5

It's a QEMU wrapper. I don't know how is this useful. It might save you 2 minutes. Maybe more with windows 11 because of tpm.

Quickemu gives me the ability to instantly spin up a full blown VM without fiddling with QEMU configurations, just by telling it what OS I want.

This might be less useful for those who are quite familiar with QEMU, but it’s great for someone like me who isn’t. So this saves me a whole lot more than 2 minutes. And that’s generally what I want from a wrapper: improved UX.

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