Qemu on Ubuntu

For a long time, I used VirtualBox as my virtualization software of choice. Not only did I have experience with it, but it also worked flawlessly, whether on Windows or on Linux. That is until I faced The virtual machine has terminated unexpectedly during startup because of signal 6 error. No matter what, I couldn't get VirtualBox working on D34010WYK NUC with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Well, maybe it was time to revisit my virtualization platform of choice.

My needs were modest. It had to work without a screen (i.e. some form of remote access), it had to support NAT network interface, and it had to support sharing a directory with host (i.e. shared folder functionality).

When I went over all contenders that could work on top of an existing Linux installation, that left me with two — VirtualBox and QEMU. Since I already had issues with VirtualBox, that left me only with QEMU to try.

I remember using QEMU back in the day a lot before I switched to VirtualBox, and it was OK but annoying to set up and it allowed no host directory sharing. Well, things change. Not all — it's still focused on command-line — but among features, it now had directory sharing.

To install QEMU we need a few prerequisites but actually less than I remember:

apt install -y libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils qemu-system-x86
systemctl enable libvirtd
systemctl start libvirtd
modprobe kvm-intel
adduser root kvm

When it comes to VM setup, you only need to create a disk (I prefer a raw one, but qcow2 and vmdk are also an option):

qemu-img create -f raw disk.raw 20G

After that, you can use qemu-system-x86_64 to boot VM for the first time:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu max -smp cpus=4 -m 16G \
  -drive file=disk.raw,format=raw \
  -boot d -cdrom /Temp/alpine-virt-3.17.1-x86_64.iso \
  -vnc :0 --enable-kvm

This will create a VM with 4 CPUs, 16 GB of RAM, and assign it the disk we created before. In addition, it will boot from CDROM containing installation media. To reach its screen we can use VNC on port 5900 (default).

Once installation is done, we power off the VM, and any subsequent boot should omit CDROM:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu max -smp cpus=4 -m 16G \
  -drive file=disk.raw,format=raw \
  -virtfs local,path=/shared,mount_tag=sf_shared,security_model=passthrough \
  -vnc :0 --enable-kvm

And that's all there is to it. As long as our command is running, our VM is too. Of course, if we want to run it in the background, we can do that too by adding
the -daemonize parameter.

Unlike with VirtualBox, within the host, we don't need any extra drivers or guest additions (at least not for Alpine Linux). We just need to mount the disk using
9p file system:

mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio sf_shared /media/sf_shared

If we want to make it permanent, we can add the following line into /etc/fstab:

sf_shared /media/sf_shared 9p trans=virtio,allow_other 0 0

With this, we have an equivalent setup to the one I used VirtualBox for. And all that with less packages installed and definitely with less disk space used.

And yes, I know QEMU is nothing new, and I remember playing with it way before I went with VirtualBox. What changed is support QEMU enjoys within guest VMs and how trouble-free its setup got.

In any case, I've solved my problem.