linuxdebian

QEMU/KVM/Virt-Manager guest support on Debian

noraj (Alexandre ZANNI)
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🇬🇧

I wrote a more detailed article Install QEMU/KVM/Virt-Manager on ArchLinux but here I will focus on installing guest additions for QEMU/KVM on Debian. By that I mean support for shared folder, shared clipboard, VirtIO devices.

VirtIO kernel modules could be auto-loaded automatically but in case it is not one has to edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add the following modules:

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virtio
virtio_blk
virtio_pci
virtio_net

Then we can force rebuild the init ramdisk:

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update-initramfs -u

Install QEMU guest additions:

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apt install qemu-guest-agent

Since the VM will be using SPICE we can improve the user experience by installing spice-vdagent to enable shared clipboard.

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apt install spice-vdagent

Then to get shared folder working with virtio-9p, we can follow the following steps.

In virt-manager VM settings:

  1. Hit the Add Hardware button
  2. Choose a Filesystem device
  3. Select virtio-9p as Driver
  4. Define the source path (folder to share from the host) and target path (a mount tag)

And in the guest, mount the share:

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sudo mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio <mount-tag> <mount-point>

For example:

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sudo mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio hostshare /home/noraj/Share

Note: it's possible to tweak the msize option to increase performance.

It's also possible to add it to /etc/fstab to mount it automatically.

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# 9P shared folder
hostshare /home/noraj/Share 9p  trans=virtio,rw,_netdev 0 0
Share