Quickemu

Simple shell script to "manage" Qemu virtual machines.

Made with 💝 for

Introduction

Quickemu is a very simple script to "manage" Qemu virtual machines. Each virtual machine configuration is broadly the same requiring minimal setup. The main objective of the project is to enable quick testing of desktop Linux distributions where the virtual machines can be stored anywhere, such as external USB storage.

Quickemu is opinionated and will attempt to "do the right thing" rather than expose rich configuration options. Quickemu is a frontend to the fully accelerated qemu-virgil. See the video where I explain some of my motivations for creating this script.

Installation

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/wimpysworld/quickemu.git

Install the qemu-virgil snap. You can find details about how to install snapd and qemu-virgil on the Snap Store page for qemu-virgil

snap install qemu-virgil --edge
snap connect qemu-virgil:kvm
snap connect qemu-virgil:removable-media

Usage

• Download a .iso image of a Linux distribution
• Create a VM configuration file; for example ubuntu.conf

iso="/media/$USER/Quickemu/ubuntu/focal-desktop-amd64.iso"
disk_img="/media/$USER/Quickemu/ubuntu/focal-desktop-amd64.qcow2
disk=128G

• Use quickemu to start the virtual machine:

./quickemu --vm ubuntu-focal-desktop.conf

Which will output something like this:

Starting /media/martin/Quickemu/ubuntu-focal-desktop.conf
 - QEMU:     /snap/bin/qemu-virgil v4.2.0
 - BIOS:     Legacy
 - Disk:     /media/martin/Quickemu/ubuntu/focal-desktop-amd64.qcow2 (64G)
 - ISO:      /media/martin/Quickemu/ubuntu/focal-desktop-amd64.iso
 - CPU:      4 Core(s)
 - RAM:      4G
 - GL:       on
 - Virgil3D: on
 - Output:   SDL
 - Display:  1664x936
 - smbd:     /home/martin will be exported to the guest via smb://10.0.2.4/qemu
 - ssh:      22221/tcp is connected. Login via 'ssh user@localhost -p 22221'

Here are the full usage instructions:

Usage
  quickemu --vm ubuntu.conf

You can also pass optional parameters
  --delete                : Delete the disk image.
  --efi                   : Enable EFI BIOS.
  --snapshot apply <tag>  : Apply/restore a snapshot.
  --snapshot create <tag> : Create a snapshot.
  --snapshot delete <tag> : Delete a snapshot.
  --snapshot info         : Show disk/snapshot info.
  --status-quo            : Do not commit any changes to disk/snapshot.

TODO

• Make display configuration more robust
• Improve stdout presentation
• Make disk image optionally size configurable
• Improve snapshot management
• Create desktop launcher for a VM
• Fix Virgil 3D on EFI boot
• Get QEMU -audiodev working for audio input, something like: