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 ...'

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.

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