BSoD after update

After recent update of Virtualbox to version 6.0.6-1, my VM becomes unaccessible for no reason.

Out of curious, I turn to QEMU/KVM solution so as to assure stable access to Windows(R) machine as per school course required.

After brief reading of well-written Arch wiki article about QEMU, I’m ready to make my hand dirty.

Migrating From Virtualbox Hard Disk

I misinterpret the concept of QEMU, to think that it works like Virtualbox where we have a file describing the machine, and a harddisk file for storage.

Even though, I tried to boot to the vdi files where Windows7 is in…only to know it failed.

Libvirt Usage

Well, it looks like Virtualbox UI, but in short, I can’t make it work without efforts.

Thus, this idea is thrown away.

Start From Scratch

Prepared the ISO from campus’ info center, I start the journey in CLI.

First, I create a qcow2

 $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 Windows7.qcow2 40G

Boot to it

 $ qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4G -drive file=/path/to/qcow2 -cdrom /path/to/windows7.iso -vga qxl

Go through Windows installer wizard, and reboot.

Now we have a basic VM up and running.

Virtio Boost

I heard of virtio a while ago, but don’t know what it is until recently.

First, we need the driver disk for Windows guest. Fedora/RedHat has kindly provided it and we have it in AUR

$ yay -S virtio-win

The ISO is installed to /usr/share/virtio/virtio-win.iso, which you can easily verify via

$ pacman -Ql virtio-win

Follow the virtio paragraph of ArchWiki and things should work.

Hard Disk

Archwiki has a thoroughly written paragraph for this topic on both fresh new virtual disk, and how to migrate from exist Windows installation to install the driver.

Noted that, as of virtio-win-0.1.164.2-1, the storage driver for w7 amd64 is broken

Other Hardware - Graphic Card, Network Card

Please follow Arch Wiki

Note that the -netdev is deprecated, use -nic instead

A Hard Attempt on iGVT

After settle down on QXL, I read iGVT-g

And after quite a few times of reinstallation/reboot, which costs me nearly one week, I failed to make it work on my i5-8250U laptop.

It all ended up Unknown error or ???? Bad Address

So, I fallback to use qxl, and bye-bye, Aero effect.

Wrap Up A Shell Script

Create a simple script under my home, rather ~/.bin or ~/.local/bin, etc. with content below

 #!/bin/bash

 qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4G \
                 -enable-kvm \
                 -nic user,model=virtio-net-pci \
                 -machine q35,accel=kvm \
                 -drive file=/path/to/your/windows.qcow2,format=qcow2,index=0,media=disk,if=virtio,aio=native,cache.direct=on,l2-cache-size=4M \
                 -cpu host,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time \
                 -usb -device usb-tablet \
                 -vga virtio -display sdl,gl=on "$@"

Enable IOMMU

 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
             -device intel-iommu \
             ...

With the fact that the window (X11 WM) is still grabbing keyboard input, a Alt+F4 would accidently close the VM and causing a force poweroff. I turn to SPICE solution

 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
                     -device virtio-serial-pci \
                     -device virtserialport,chardev=spicechannel0,name=com.redhat.spice.0 \
                     -chardev spicevmc,id=spicechannel0,name=vdagent \
                     -spice unix,addr=/path/to/store/spice.socket,disable-ticketing
                     ...

Install virt-viewer and daemonize the process

 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
                 -daemonize \
                 ...

and can be connected via

 $ remote-viewer spice+unix:///path/to/spice.socket

Add some more pins to it

 export QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=pa
 export QEMU_PA_SINK=$(pacmd list-sinks | grep -e 'name:' | cut -d ' ' -f 2| sed -e 's,<,,' -e 's,>,,')
 export QEMU_PA_SOURCE=input

 qemu-system-x86_64 ...
                 -name a_cool_name \
                 -pidfile /path/to/vm.pid \
                 -rtc base=localtime \
                 -soundhw hda \
                 ...

Now it sings!

Noted that I’m using straight forward sed lines, I believe there is better way to wrap it up