It is a bit tricky but not impossible to emulate MMC/SD card storage in a virtual machine controlled by libvirt.
Category: Virtualization
Executing arbitrary commands in your libvirt/Qemu virtual machine through Qemu guest agent
Many of us are used to installing additional Virtualization software-specific tools in virtual machines in order to get seamless Copy & Paste, higher screen resolutions — think “VMWare tools” or the “VirtualBox guest extensions”. So does Qemu, the working horse behind most libvirt-powered virtual machines these days, with the “Qemu guest agent”. But did you… Continue reading Executing arbitrary commands in your libvirt/Qemu virtual machine through Qemu guest agent
SeaBIOS 1.14 breaks Windows installation on non-bootable virtio disks
On my development laptop I could install Windows inside a libvirt/KVM VM without problems. When I tried the same on a different KVM host, Windows would refuse installation with the error message “Windows can’t be installed on this device”, inspite of the two VMs having absolutely identical settings.
Introducing a custom Yast module for importing libvirt configuration files from existing installations
I like fresh, reproducible installs when a new version of your preferred Linux distro (in my case openSUSE) comes out. Ensuring the perceived (!) feeling that a system is a “clean” state is hard enough during its lifecycle already and ensuring it is so after doing an upgrade installation is even harder. That’s why I… Continue reading Introducing a custom Yast module for importing libvirt configuration files from existing installations
libvirt, TianoCore EFI firmware, suspend-to-mem enabled leads to blank VM console in virt-manager
I don’t know yet if it’s really a bug or not but I’ve seen some weird behavior while trying to programmatically set up a VM in EFI mode with libvirt which involves a blank VM console unless I explicitly disable suspend-to-mem for the EFI firmware.
Why your kernel’s drm.edid_firmware parameter doesn’t work anymore in libvirt environments
The enterprise world is one that is fond of funny, crappy hardware gadgets such as KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) switches, often in the matrix variant: you have one or more consoles connected matrix-style to different computers, for the obvious benefit of not having to connect keyboard, mouse and monitor when needed let alone have a set connected… Continue reading Why your kernel’s drm.edid_firmware parameter doesn’t work anymore in libvirt environments
Enabling libvirt channels by adding virtio_console to the openSUSE installation
libvirt supports the concept of so-called channels that represent private communication channels between a libvirt guest and its host.
Connecting to libvirtd as non-root user on openSUSE 13.1
As a revisit to my previous post on connecting to libvirtd as a non-root user on openSUSE 12.2, the way to do it on openSUSE 13.1 is the same that worked for Marek Goldmann on Fedora 18 (although he used the wheel group). Create /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/80-libvirt-manage.rules with the following content: polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if (action.id ==… Continue reading Connecting to libvirtd as non-root user on openSUSE 13.1
Patching VirtualBox guest additions for SLES12/RHEL7 guests
This may not be relevant to most of you, yet, as the SLES12 and RHEL7 beta programs are not quite open to the public, but similar problems may happen to you with other distributions that do backports of patches as well.
How to recreate / build VirtualBox guest additions ISO image VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
As Linux kernel development progresses, so do interfaces change from time to time and kernel modules outside of the Linux kernel such as VirtualBox’s guest additions need more or less updating. Having done some patching in the VirtualBox sources, you might want to rebuild the guest additions ISO image, VBoxGuestAdditions.iso, so you can try out… Continue reading How to recreate / build VirtualBox guest additions ISO image VBoxGuestAdditions.iso