QEMU Upstream

From Xen
Revision as of 14:13, 30 July 2012 by Anthony (talk | contribs) (new feature, spice and virtio)

How to build QEMU (upstream version) 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
    • For xen-unstable.hg versions between 23412:996c7726a376 and 23632:33717472f37e you will need to copy path_to_xen/tools/libxc/xc_e820.h to $path_to_xen_source/dist/install/usr/include" for configuration script to work. After 23632:33717472f37e xc_e820.h was squashed into xenctrl.h
    • ./configure --enable-xen --target-list=i386-softmmu --extra-cflags="-I$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' ]

To use virtio for a block device (disk) ...

You will need those kernel modules to use a virtio device

 virtio_mmio virtio_pci virtio_net virtio_blk

SPICE / QXL

SPICE is an other remote-display protocol and QXL is a PV framebuffer which use the best of the SPICE capability. 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 which to use QXL as well you'll have to add:

 device_model_args_hvm = [ '-vga', 'qxl' ]
 videoram = 64

But QXL does not work yet under Xen.