QEMU and kqemu on IBM's OpenClient

Today I wanted to try QEMU on IBM's OpenClient Linux distribution. Unfortunately, I was unable to install a binary package through yum because the default package repositories don't provide one. So I ended up installing QEMU from the sources.

Getting the sources is easy. To fetch the latest sources (i.e. CVS HEAD), just run:

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:/sources/qemu \
 co qemu

In my case, I wanted version QEMU version 0.9.1, so I did this:

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:/sources/qemu \
 co -rrelease_0_9_1 qemu

Building the sources is trivial as well. The usual three step process (configure, make, make install) works like a charm. If PREFIX isn't set, QEMU installs in /usr/local, but I want it in /opt. So here's what I did:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt
$ make
$ sudo make install

Now I had a bunch of QEMU executables in /opt/bin, each one for a different architecture. But I wanted kqemu, the kernel accellerator for QEMU, as well. Through the QEMU home page, I found this site which provides kqemu RPMs for RHEL and Fedora.

For the IBM OpenClient distribution, I had to do this:

$ wget http://dl.atrpms.net/all/kqemu-1.3.0-2.el5.i386.rpm
$ wget http://dl.atrpms.net/all/kqemu-kmdl-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5-1.3.0-2.el5.i686.rpm
$ sudo rpm -iv kqemu-1.3.0-2.el5.i386.rpm kqemu-kmdl-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5-1.3.0-2.el5.i686.rpm

In case the links to the RPMs are truncated, there is a kqemu RPM and a kqemu-kmdl RPM.

Finally, in order to actually load the kernel module, I did this:

$ sudo modprobe kqemu

Everything described here is pretty straight forward, but I wanted to make sure I document the installation of the kqemu module somwhere, hence this post.