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.

See the video where I explain my motivations for creating this script.

Installation

Ubuntu 19.10 or newer

Install qemu

sudo apt install qemu qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon bridge-utils ovmf
sudo adduser ${SUDO_USER} kvm

Install samba (optional) if you want to share home directories with guest virtual machines

sudo apt install samba

Install the qemu-virgil snap (optional)

snap install qemu-virgil
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.sh to start the virtual machine:

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

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 (experimental).
  --restore  : Restore the snapshot.
  --snapshot : Create a disk snapshot.
  --virgil   : Use virgil, if available.

TODO

• Make display configuration more robust
• Improve stdout presentation
• Make disk image optionally size configurable
• Improve snapshot management