On 05/03/14 18:23, Boryeu Mao wrote:
> I did use qemu-system-x86_64 on the SL65 image.  I will first try
> qemu-kvm, and then (as a lst resort) virt-manager and libvirtd - I had
> to do quite a bit work to get libvirt going when I was using
> Debian/Knoppix, and the relative simplicity of qemu-system-x86_64
> (just 'qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom CDROM.iso') was quite nice.  In any
> event the advantage of libvirt may be worth the work.  

My experience with virt-manager on Fedora, RHEL and SL the last 3-4
years have been that it's quite capable as a desktop virtualisation
tool.  The pacakges available out of the box have sane default configs
to "just get started (tm)".

If you want to use more advanced features, virsh is the command line
interface to libvirt.  But having a little idea of the features
available in virt-manager can help understanding virsh better.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth



> On 3/5/14, David Sommerseth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On 05/03/14 16:32, Boryeu Mao wrote:
>>> I have recently migrated from Debian-based Knoppix to SL
>>> (livecd-iso-to-disk from SL-65-x86_64-2014-02-06-LiveDVD.iso), and
>>> installed the emulator from the package
>>> qemu-system-x86-1.0-27.2.x86_64.rpm).  The emulator booted a Knoppix
>>> image without incidents (albeit somewhat slowly,
>>> KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.iso).  However, booting the SL 65
>>> LiveDVD didn't go so well - it hangs in the startup screen with the
>>> inner arc stopping at about 3 o'clock position.  I wonder if there may
>>> be another package for qemu that I should use, or if there is another
>>> virtual machine that may be more robust for SL.  Thanks in advance for
>>> help or suggestions.
>>>
>>> SL-65-x86_64-2014-02-06-LiveDVD.iso (via livecd-iso-to-disk)
>>> HP laptop Pavilion g6 with dual AMD A6-4400M APU
>>
>> AFAICT, AMD A6-4400M supports hardware virtualization (aka KVM in the
>> Linux world).  I'd recommend you to try using qemu-kvm instead of
>> qemy-system-x86.  That should improve the performance noticeably.
>>
>> In addition, the SL image you've downloaded is 64 bits.  I don't know if
>> you try to run that via qemu-system-i386 or qemu-system-x86_64.  The
>> former is 32bit /emulation/, the latter 64bit.
>>
>> But only qemu-kvm uses virtualization.
>>
>> Try also to kick off your images using virt-manager.  It's usually
>> fairly simple to configure new VMs that way, and just point it to your
>> images.  This way, virt-manager/libvirtd will take care of setting up
>> the proper arguments to qemu-kvm, for better performance.  Also try to
>> use the virtio drivers wherever possible, as they don't require the
>> complete hardware emulation layer.
>>
>>
>> --
>> kind regards,
>>
>> David Sommerseth
>>
>>