KVM on Debian

KVM on Debian

[Aaron Clausen]

I'm running a production Debian Lenny server using KVM to run a couple
of Windows and a couple of Linux guests.  All is working well, but I
want to give my Server 2003 guest access to a SCSI tape drive.
Unfortunately, Debian is pretty conservative, and the version of KVM
is too old to support this.  Is there a reasonably safe way of
upgrading to one of the newer versions of KVM on this server?

-- 
Aaron Clausen
mightymartianca@gmail.com

Re: KVM on Debian

[Mark van Walraven]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 01:37:54PM -0700, Aaron Clausen wrote:
> I'm running a production Debian Lenny server using KVM to run a couple
> of Windows and a couple of Linux guests.  All is working well, but I
> want to give my Server 2003 guest access to a SCSI tape drive.
> Unfortunately, Debian is pretty conservative, and the version of KVM
> is too old to support this.  Is there a reasonably safe way of
> upgrading to one of the newer versions of KVM on this server?

I'm interested in this too, so far I have found that Lenny's libvirt fails
to parse the output of kvm --help, though this is fixed in the libvirt in
testing.  The kvm package from experimental seems to work well - after a
day of testing.

My next step is to try qemu-kvm, built from source.  The Debianised libvirt
expects the kvm binaries to be in /usr/bin/kvm, so you can symlink them
from /usr/local/bin if you prefer to install there.  I've also experimented
with shell script wrapper in /usr/bin/kvm that condenses the output of
qemu-kvm --help so that libvirtd for Lenny works.

Regards,

Mark.

Re: KVM on Debian

[Mark van Walraven]

Hi,

An update in the hope that this is useful to someone :-)

On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 09:03:03AM +1200, Mark van Walraven wrote:
> My next step is to try qemu-kvm, built from source.  The Debianised libvirt
> expects the kvm binaries to be in /usr/bin/kvm, so you can symlink them
> from /usr/local/bin if you prefer to install there.  I've also experimented
> with shell script wrapper in /usr/bin/kvm that condenses the output of
> qemu-kvm --help so that libvirtd for Lenny works.

Actually, the current Debian Lenny libvirt* (0.4.6-10) seem to work
fine with qemu-kvm-0.10.5 built from source.  All I needed to do was
symlink /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 to /usr/bin/kvm and copy
extboot.bin into /usr/local/share/qemu/ (I used the one from the
kvm 85+dfsg-3 package in Experimental).

So far, so good.

Mark.

Re: KVM on Debian

[Matthew Palmer]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 01:37:54PM -0700, Aaron Clausen wrote:
> I'm running a production Debian Lenny server using KVM to run a couple
> of Windows and a couple of Linux guests.  All is working well, but I
> want to give my Server 2003 guest access to a SCSI tape drive.
> Unfortunately, Debian is pretty conservative, and the version of KVM
> is too old to support this.  Is there a reasonably safe way of
> upgrading to one of the newer versions of KVM on this server?

Backporting kvm from experimental is straightforward, and has worked fine
for me.

- Matt

Re: KVM on Debian

[Michael Tokarev]

Aaron Clausen wrote:
[]
> is too old to support this.  Is there a reasonably safe way of
> upgrading to one of the newer versions of KVM on this server?

Can't say for "safe" but you can grab my .debs which I use here
on a bunch of machines, from http://www.corpit.ru/debian/tls/kvm/ -
both binaries and sources.  To make them more safe to you, you
can download .dsc, .diff.gz, examine the content and build it
yourself.

/mjt

KVM on Debian

[Avi Kivity]

Baruch Even has added Debian packages to the Debian archive.  It is now 
possible to install kvm on Debian hosts using the native installer.

Please see the Debian HOWTO page [1] for instructions.


[1] http://kvm.sourceforge.net/debian.html

-- 
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.


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KVM on Debian

[Baruch Even]

I've created the packages for Debian, for now I haven't uploaded them to
the Archive, I'l wait for the next revision to clean up some of the
packaging issues.

The instructions for now are:

Go to http://people.debian.org/~baruch/kvm and download all the *.deb
files.

apt-get install module-assistant
dpkg -i *.deb

m-a build kvm
m-a install kvm
kvm -cdrom debian-live-cd.iso -boot d

kvm is qemu with KVM support. You might need to install the headers
package for your kernel if you don't already have it. Some other time
I'll look at producing the kernel module packages for the standard
Debian kernels.

Cheers,
Baruch

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Re: KVM on Debian

[Avi Kivity]

Baruch Even wrote:
> I've created the packages for Debian, for now I haven't uploaded them to
> the Archive, I'l wait for the next revision to clean up some of the
> packaging issues.
>
> The instructions for now are:
>
> Go to http://people.debian.org/~baruch/kvm and download all the *.deb
> files.
>
> apt-get install module-assistant
> dpkg -i *.deb
>
> m-a build kvm
> m-a install kvm
> kvm -cdrom debian-live-cd.iso -boot d
>
> kvm is qemu with KVM support. You might need to install the headers
> package for your kernel if you don't already have it. Some other time
> I'll look at producing the kernel module packages for the standard
> Debian kernels.
>   

Cool, thanks.

Once the kernel module package is there, I'll update the HOWTO for 
Debian users.


-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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KVM on Debian

[Baruch Even]

Hi,

I got KVM to work on Debian just now with a few problems:

To install all needed dependencies:
apt-get install libuuid-dev gcc-3.4 libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev

./configure didn't work for me as it didn't find the gcc-3.4 and uname
-i failed to work:

sed -i -e 's/$(uname -i)/i386/' configure
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/kvm --qemu-cc=gcc-3.4

kvm.ko wasn't installed into /lib/modules/`uname -r`

other than that things look good, this is on kernel 2.6.17-2-686
on an Intel Core Duo. So far I only tried to run the Debian LiveCD and
it run very nicely.

What are the plans with regard to merging the needed qemu changes
upstream? It would be nice to be able to package the kernel module and
know that everything else will just work.

And for a temporary package for Debian, is there anything else that is
needed besides the qemu executable and the kernel module? I noticed
there is a library and some include files, anything uses them?

Cheers,
Baruch

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Re: KVM on Debian

[Avi Kivity]

Baruch Even wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I got KVM to work on Debian just now with a few problems:
>
> To install all needed dependencies:
> apt-get install libuuid-dev gcc-3.4 libsdl1.2-dev zlib1g-dev
>
>   

I believe there are documented in the HOWTO, though with generic names.


> ./configure didn't work for me as it didn't find the gcc-3.4 and uname
> -i failed to work:
>
> sed -i -e 's/$(uname -i)/i386/' configure
>   

I already have a fix for this in my local tree.

> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/kvm --qemu-cc=gcc-3.4
>
> kvm.ko wasn't installed into /lib/modules/`uname -r`
>   

Yes.  I'll fix that.

> other than that things look good, this is on kernel 2.6.17-2-686
> on an Intel Core Duo. So far I only tried to run the Debian LiveCD and
> it run very nicely.
>
> What are the plans with regard to merging the needed qemu changes
> upstream? It would be nice to be able to package the kernel module and
> know that everything else will just work.
>
> And for a temporary package for Debian, is there anything else that is
> needed besides the qemu executable and the kernel module? 

the qemu executable needs files in /usr/share/qemu.  I suggest adding a 
dependency on the qemu package (and calling the executable /usr/bin/kvm).

> I noticed
> there is a library and some include files, anything uses them?
>
>   

Not at this time.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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Re: KVM on Debian

[Avi Kivity]

Baruch Even wrote:
> What are the plans with regard to merging the needed qemu changes
> upstream? It would be nice to be able to package the kernel module and
> know that everything else will just work.
>   

Forgot to answer that.  My plans are to submit the qemu changes once the 
userspace interface is stabilized.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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Re: KVM on Debian

[Baruch Even]

* Avi Kivity <avi-atKUWr5tajBWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org> [061114 10:46]:
> Baruch Even wrote:
> >What are the plans with regard to merging the needed qemu changes
> >upstream? It would be nice to be able to package the kernel module and
> >know that everything else will just work.
> >  
> 
> Forgot to answer that.  My plans are to submit the qemu changes once the userspace interface is stabilized.

Sounds good. I'll do my package seperately from qemu and depend on qemu
as suggested by you in another mail, hopefully it won't take long before
I can drop my qemu-kvm package.

Cheers,
Baruch

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