Summary

• Disclaimer
• Installing QEMU
• Creating virtual machine storage
• Running virtual machine
• Useful keybindings
• UEFI support
• 3D acceleration support
• Special thanks

Disclaimer

This guide makes assumes that:

• You’re running Arch
• You use doas instead of sudo

These are far from being requirements, and are just a matter of my personal preference based on my system, you can use whatever you’re comfortable with

As a consequence, all the package names and file paths mentioned along this guide might differ, depending on your distro

Installing QEMU

doas pacman -S qemu

Creating virtual machine storage

The virtual machine storage is a file that holds all the data from a given virtual machine, run the command below to create it:

qemu-img create \
    -f qcow2 \
    Storage.img \
    16G

• The -f flag represents the format that will be used for creating the storage file, qcow2 (QEMU Copy On Write 2) is recommended
• You can use any name of the storage file, the extension is not a hard requirement but it’s recommended for explicitly specifying the file type
• The last parameter is the size of the storage used by the virtual machine, any size can be passed, the suffix letter represents the measurement unit for the storage size (for example, M for megabytes and G for gigabytes)

Running virtual machine

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cdrom OS_ISO.iso \
    -boot menu=on \
    -drive file=Image.img \
    -m 2G

• As the name says, -enable-kvm enables KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), for better performance
• -cdrom allows us to specify the .iso file of the OS that will run on the virtual machine
• -boot enables a boot menu
• -drive allow us to specify the previously created storage file to act as the hard drive
• -m sets the maximum amount of RAM that will be allocated for the virtual machine usage

Useful keybindings

• Ctrl + Alt + G - exit QEMU keyboard capture
• Ctrl + Alt + F - enables fullscreen mode

UEFI support

First, install the edk2-ovmf package:

doas pacman -S edk2-ovmf

OVMF enables UEFI support for virtual machines, it contains sample UEFI firmware for QEMU and KVM

Then, run qemu with the same parameters mentioned on the Running virtual machine step, but this time with the -bios flag, example below:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -bios /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/OVMF.fd \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cdrom OS_ISO.iso \
    -boot menu=on \
    -drive file=Image.img \
    -m 2G

The -bios flag allow us to specify a custom firmware for the virtual machine, in this case, we are passing the path to edk2-ovmf UEFI firmware file

3D acceleration support

In case you’re running a wayland compositor like Sway, river or Mutter, having 3D acceleration enabled is a must in order to have a working graphical environment

To enable it, simply add the -device virtio-vga-gl flag when running the virtual machine

Special thanks

• To DenshiVideo for his insightful video on YouTube