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64bit guest emulation… enter QEMU

Well, I have a definite need to have virtual machine support for 64bit guests so imagine how pleased I was when vmware indicated that the new version of workstation (5.5.0) would have support for 64bit guests. Fantastic! Then, reading the fine print, discovered that I would need to buy a new CPU (won’t work with older AMD64 CPUs) and then a new motherboard to go with it, and the extras… new RAM and probably a new video card. Unimpressed, I’m looking at an alternative called QEMU.

QEMU virtualizes a lot more than just a 32bit PC; it can also emulate x86_64, sparc, ppc, and a few others I think. My only real interest is in virtualizing x86_64.

Well, nice as that sounds in theory (and most of the people I’ve talked to use it to virtualize a 32bit OS… something I’m not interested in because vmware does that quite nicely). Well, trying to load Mandriva 2006/x86_64 in QEMU is a bit of a bummer… not only does lilo and grub both segfault, but I can’t get past the bloody bootloader during install! So three times I’ve tried now and three times I’ve been unable to complete the installation. Not happy in the slightest. I remember older Mandrake releases would let you skip past stuff, but apparently not anymore (bad idea, in my opinion… we need a “skip” button on some stuff like crashing bootloaders).

Trying with LE2005 now… if I can get most of the supported distros running in QEMU, that just means one less distro to chroot for security testing.

Does seem like pretty cool software tho.

1 Comment
Nov 8, 2005
By vdanen Linux

One Comment

  1. Vincent Danen

    Well, I did manage to get LE2005 up and running (strange thing.. “lilo” works but “lilo -v” segfaults.. go figure). Also got Corporate Desktop 3.0 running in it as well.

    Man is it SLOOOOOWW! Need to figure out how to use the accelerator stuff. This is just too slow to handle, especially boots (and for me, I need the dang vm for about 5 minutes, so take that long to boot up makes it counter-productive.. need to figure out if I can suspend it like I do with vmware… that’ll make life much easier).

    All in all, it’s not bad. I prefer vmware by tonnes, but this will have to do I guess.

    Nov 09, 2005 @ 16:34:58

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