Difference between revisions of "QEMU Upstream"

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There are some benefits from upstreaming the support of Xen to QEMU.
 
There are some benefits from upstreaming the support of Xen to QEMU.
 
We can now use:
 
We can now use:
* VirtIO, as an alternative to Xen PV drivers
+
* VirtIO as an alternative to Xen PV drivers
 
* SPICE, as a remote-display protocol instead of the old VNC.
 
* SPICE, as a remote-display protocol instead of the old VNC.
 
* different kind of file format for a disc.
 
* different kind of file format for a disc.

Revision as of 13:22, 10 September 2013

How to build QEMU with Xen

Nowadays, xen-unstable will clone and build a qemu git tree from xenbits. (It is qemu-stable-1.0 today). But you can follow this guide to build the upstream unstable qemu git tree.

You can add this to your "xen-unstable.git/.config" file, so xen-unstable will clone and build the upstream tree.

 QEMU_UPSTREAM_URL = git://git.qemu.org/qemu.git
 QEMU_UPSTREAM_REVISION = master


Then, add "device_model_version = 'qemu-xen'" in your vm config file to use this new qemu.

Or build qemu out of the xen-unstable dir:

Get the source


Build it!

  • Build Xen
    • make xen tools, if it fail see bellow.
  • Build QEMU upstream with Xen
    • ./configure --enable-xen --target-list=i386-softmmu --extra-cflags="-I$path_to_xen_source/tools/include -I$path_to_xen_source/tools/libxc -I$path_to_xen_source/tools/xenstore" --extra-ldflags="-L$path_to_xen_source/tools/libxc -L$path_to_xen_source/tools/xenstore"
    • make

Troubleshooting compilation errors: If you get an error from configure like "ERROR: User requested feature xen ERROR: configure was not able to find it" then see this: http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/Upstream-Qemu-With-Xen-configuration-problem-td4561779.html , ie. you need to point the paths for "configure" to xen source directory, not to xen dist directory.

Run it!

Either:

  • With the latest xen-unstable tree, use:
    • device_model_version = 'qemu-xen'
    • device_model_override = '/root/work/qemu/_build/i386-softmmu/qemu-system-i386'

Now xl will always try run qemu upstream with seabios, so build xen with seabios.

Use with SeaBIOS

SeaBIOS support is now fully integrated into the Xen build system (in xen-unstable and xen-4.2 onwards) and is always used when using device_model_version = "qemu-xen".

If you want to build a version of SeaBIOS other than the default then you can override SEABIOS_UPSTREAM_URL and/or SEABIOS_UPSTREAM_TAG via .config. For reference the upstream SeaBIOS repository is [[1]].

New features

VirtIO

It's the PV drivers from KVM world. To use it for network, just use 'virtio-net' as a model:

 vif = [ 'model=virtio-net' ]

You will need those kernel modules to use a VirtIO device

 virtio_mmio virtio_pci virtio_net

SPICE / QXL

SPICE is another remote-display protocol and QXL is a PV framebuffer which uses the best of the SPICE capabilities. To activate SPICE you can add this in the VM config file (this works only with xl).

 spice=1
 spicehost='0.0.0.0'
 spiceport=6000
 spicedisable_ticketing=1

If you wish to use QXL as well you have to add:

 device_model_args_hvm = [ '-vga', 'qxl' ]
 videoram = 128

QXL does not currently work under Xen due to some limitation. (check [this email] for more information.)

Difference with qemu-xen-traditional

Missing feature from the good old qemu-dm

Currently, there is few missing feature that not supported by QEMU upstream, but the work is ongoing.

  • dirty log: This is needed to migrate a guest. Patches have been posted to both QEMU and libxl, but are not applied yet.
  • VGA passthrough: Sometime (all the time?), simple PCI passthrough does not works for graphics card. The few things that are done in qemu-dm are not yet upstreamed.

New feature from QEMU upstream

There are some benefits from upstreaming the support of Xen to QEMU. We can now use:

  • VirtIO as an alternative to Xen PV drivers
  • SPICE, as a remote-display protocol instead of the old VNC.
  • different kind of file format for a disc.
  • the ability to connect several times to the VNC server.
  • ...