QEMU/Windows guest

This article describes the setup of a Windows guest using QEMU.

Host
To create a disk image for the virtual machine, run:

Download Windows driver image from http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/.

Since QEMU requires a lot of options, it would be a good idea to put them into a shell script, e.g.:

Change the path to your disk image WindowsVM.img in the script. You can additional options when calling the script. To boot the disk image, run:

Install the Windows guest. See the guest section for optimum support. After the installation start the script without the additional options.

Guest

 * During installation at the partition step Windows doesn't detect the VirtIO hard drive. You have to tell Windows to use the viostor driver from the driver image.


 * After installation Windows doesn't for the VirtIO ethernet adapter. You have to tell Windows to use the netkvm driver from the driver image.


 * For 32 bit Windows 7 a sound driver for the Intel 82801AA AC97 exists.


 * For 64 bit Windows 7 Intel hda is available as an option (qemu option: '... -soundhw hda ...')


 * USB 2.0 pass through can be configured from host to guest with variations of: '... -usb -device usb-ehci,id=ehci -device usb-host,bus=ehci.0,vendorid=1452 ...'


 * For Windows 8.1 USB tablet is available only with USB 2.0 pass through (qemu option: '... -device usb-ehci,id=ehci -device usb-tablet,bus=ehci.0 ...')

SPICE
QEMU with SPICE support enable (among other things) the more powerful QXL display device and makes clipboard sharing possible (copy/paste between clients and the virtual machine).

To use SPICE with QEMU enable the following USE flags

and build qemu:

Guest
On Windows guests you need to install Windows guest tools.

On Windows 8.1 guest if you want to set screen resolution more than 1024x768, you need to install drivers from http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/ and QXL WDDM DOD driver. If you try to install Windows guest tool, QXL WDDM DOD driver won't work well because of Windows SPICE agent.

If you want to try the new qlx-dod driver linked above, in order to use the driver you need to 'update' the basic windows display adapter driver and point it to the unzipped folder for the new driver. This can be found by: Right click on the Start button > Device Manager. Expand 'Display adapters' and right click on the sub entry and hit update driver.

Running qemu
To run QEMU from a script, e.g.: