Virtual Machine Manager vs. QEMU

[early-ehlinger]

I'm trying out the virtualization support in F8 and hitting a few brick walls that I hope to get some help with.

First, if I try to install XP64 via the Virtual Machine Manager, I get an error at boot that there is no APIC.

However, the underlying virtual machine apparently can emulate an APIC, because if I do this:

/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -d -cdrom win64.iso win64-test.img

I can install XP64 without a problem.

I can also run XP64 inside qemu-system-x86_64 without issue.

But, if I create a virtual machine from the Virtual Machine Manager, or using virsh, using win64-test.img, I get the same error message, even after building the virtual machine image using qemu-system-x86_64.

What's really weird is that the Virtual Machine Manager/virsh system seems to use qemu-system-x86_64 internally, as a virsh dumpxml for the VM suggests:

<domain type='qemu'>
<name>win64-test</name>
<uuid>a398dc4e-57f5-0a38-2cb1-9ef0c4c14c55</uuid>
<memory>524288</memory>
<currentMemory>524288</currentMemory>
<vcpu>1</vcpu>
<os>
<type arch='x86_64' machine='pc'>hvm</type>
<boot dev='hd'/>
</os>
<clock offset='localtime'/>
<on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
<on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
<on_crash>destroy</on_crash>
<devices>
<emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator>
<disk type='file' device='disk'>
<source file='/home/earlye/win64-test.img'/>
<target dev='hda'/>
</disk>
<interface type='network'>
<mac address='00:16:3e:40:47:69'/>
<source network='default'/>
<target dev='vnet0'/>
</interface>
<input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>
<input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
<graphics type='vnc' port='-1' listen='127.0.0.1'/>
</devices>
</domain>

My question is: how do I get the Virtual Machine Manager to enable the APIC?

[dariyoosh]

Hello,

Well, first of all, I'm not going to answer your question about APIC
because I don't know the answer.
But if you want to install windows XP, and you don't want to use particularly
qemu as virtualizer, well I suggest VirtualBox, I installed both Windows XP
and Windows Vista, it seemed to me quite easy and fast (yet fast as a virtualizer)

Personally, I never succeeded in using Virtual Machine Manager with Fedora Core 8.0
I don't know why the new button doesn't work!!. However it seems that many use it
without problem.

Good luck

[early-ehlinger]

I really want the Virtual Machine Manager and libvirt approach so that I can automate some things from C. There might be a method to get close to what I'm looking for by just fork/exec-ing qemu-system-x86_64, but I'm not sure about programatically suspending/restoring a virtual machine using that approach. I guess I could take a look at the libvirt or virtd source code and see how they interact with qemu...

The new button only gets enabled if you actually connect to the session and have it selected.