I'm not sure what help I hope to get, as I really don't know much about my
problem.
A while ago, after struggling to get it working, I finally got VirtualBox
working, and it worked great. Then, I upgraded to Trisquel 7 when it first
came out, and because there were parts that didn't work right, I ended up
reinstalling 6.0.1. I never bothered to go through all that trouble again to
set up VirtualBox.
Now, though, I want to take another look at 7 in a virtual machine to see how
it's progressed. VirtualBox is pretty much off the table, since I use
jxself's kernel (I have both 3.14 and 3.10 installed), which doesn't include
the necessary VirtualBox module. So, taking the advice of the forums, I've
been experimenting with QEMU and KVM.
My first few experiments were disasters. Nothing worked, and while I find the
help giving on this forum usually useful, the QEMU and KVM documentation is
so far above my head, I can't get anything out of it.
Finally, using virt-manager and KVM, I've been able to get some things
running. I changed the default directory to a place on my data drive instead
of my OS drive, so I had a ton of space to work with. I've been able to
create a few guest machines, and even managed to install a few OSs. But I
still encounter lots of problems.
1) I can't bridge my network interfaces like it describes at
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/virtualization-using-kvm. I know I don't have a
static IP address, so I use the dhcp option. But, my computer is connected to
the internet through a wireless connection (I'm working on drilling a hole in
the wall to run an ethernet cord through it). If I try to change the
bridge_port to wlan0, I get an error that says a bridge cannot be connected
to it. If I leave it as eth0, I don't get an error, but when I do ifdown/up,
I get the message about "Waiting for br0 to get ready", and even after
walking away for f10 minutes, nothing happens.
2) There are plenty of times where the guest machines don't boot. They spew
lots of post screen errors instead. Generally, closing down the machine and
virt-manager altogether, then trying again will solve it. But sometimes, I
have to delete the entire guest machine because once it breaks, it doesn't
ever come back.
3) Everything in my virtual machines is extremely sluggish. I've read that
running in KVM should be nearly as fast as running on a physical machine, but
that is not my experience at all. I've tried to work out this virtio stuff,
but the documentation is again so far above me that I can't even tell if I
HAVE virtio available. The mouse is one of the worst culprits--it moves
slowly and gets trailed by 4-5 other pointers behind it. I tried adding a
tablet to the guest machine, but upon booting up the guest machine, it
doesn't recognize that setting. Maybe it's because I don't actually have a
physical writing tablet connected to the computer (the tip and documentation
don't say anything about it other than "add and make a writing tablet the
default pointer").
4) Sometimes, the visual display is awful. I installed Mint 17 XFCE as a test
in a guest machine, and many of the visual elements were corrupted and
unrecognizable, which is not the case when I boot up the Live CD on my
computer to compare. AT least this wasn't a problem with trying to test out
Trisquel 7, but I noticed that some of the other visual effects that I
remembered from my brief time using 7 weren't there, either.
4) There are so many settings for the machines in virt-manager that I don't
understand, so I can't tell if one of them helps me more than the others.
While it took me a long time to get VirtualBox to actually up and run, once I
was able to boot the guest machines and install OSs, the guest machines ran
like dreams with very little need for tweaking. I was hoping that, using
graphical tools like virt-manager or AQEMU, I would be able to get the same
results with QEMU and KVM.
Because I'm so very lost, I can't really give more specific questions or
issues than that right now. If anyone is willing to really take the time to
patiently help me walk through some steps until I have a better understanding
of what's going on, I would really appreciate it.
- [Trisquel-users] QEMU and KVM Problems ken
-
