"Parallels" for Linux

Ben has an interesting post on how to boot Windows XP using KVM on Fedora Core 9. The interesting part is that Windows XP is installed on the host's hard disk. His instructions almost work verbatim, but there's one exception. Since I'm using KVM-73, the QEMU command is:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sda -net nic -net user -m 1024 \
    -cdrom fixntldr.iso -boot d -std-vga 

This will also give the guest system access to the network.

Qemu, FreeBSD and coreboot

Since my attempts at getting Qemu running on Mac OS X were unsuccessfull, I've decided to go a different route. I'm now trying to build it on FreeBSD again.

Some time ago, I took some notes on how to get Qemu running on FreeBSD and added them to the coreboot wiki. Then some time later, I tried to build Qemu per those instructions, but had to discover that the port had been updated to a newer version of Qemu and no longer works.

So I've decided so maintain my own copy of the Qemu sources. The goal is to have a working version of Qemu which can be built on FreeBSD and can run coreboot. The repository is at svn+ssh://phs.subgra.de/usr/svnroot/qemu, a web frontend is available at https://phs.subgra.de/svnweb/index.cgi/qemu. Since the repository is not (yet?) public, here is a tar-ball of the latest version.

Building Qemu for FreeBSD from "my" sources is pretty straight forward. However, it's not as straight forward as building from Linux or from a FreeBSD port, so here are the full instructions ;-)

$ export BSD_MAKE=`which make`
$ ./configure (your options here)
$ gmake
$ gmake install

Have fun.

TianoCore on QEMU

There is a bios.bin binary file for use with QEMU available at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/efi-bios.tar.bz2. It is meant to be used as a BIOS replacement for QEMU and provides an EFI interface. It is compiled from the TianoCore sources, at least that's what the QEMU homepage suggests.

The problem with this file is that it can only be used with very few versions of QEMU, that's why I'm writing this.

I've had success with version 0.9.0 when the patches linked from the coreboot wiki were applied. I've also had success with a CVS snapshot from July 3rd, 2007. Version 0.9.1 or the stock 0.9.0 do not work.

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.