Re: running qemu on an AMD64 box to host Windows 98......
Michael Fothergill wrote:
> I am running Etch r0 AMD64 on an AMD64 Sempron 3200 box with an 80GB drive.
> I notice that qemu 0.8.2-4 is available from browsing synaptic.
>
> I also saw some other software like qemuctl and qemu-launcher.
>
> I went on the qemu web site and I nosed around a little. There were
> instructions for running qemu on an 32 bit processor under linux then
> guesting e.g. Windows XP (32 bit) on top of the Linux.
>
> There were some references to running qemu on AMD64 but mostly indirect
> ones.
>
> Has anyone tried this?
I have installed Win98, Win2k and WinXP in Qemu running on AMD64 and
they run fine. Qemu can run both 64bit and 32bit code. However my
installad systems do not work in Qemu 0.9.0, and several people have
reported problems during installations of these operating systems in the
Qemu forums. Also note that the installation takes quite a while longer
than on normal hardware.
> At a dumb level, is qemu smart enough to "fake" the 32 bit environment
> on my 64 bit box running Debian AMD64 OS that MS Windows 98 would be
> happy to run on or would it only let you run a 64 bit version of
> MSWindows on a 64 bit machine like mine?
Yes. I guess the emulated processor starts up just like a normal
processor in 32bit-mode and then gets switched to 64bit-mode when a
64bit-system is started.
> The instructions for a 32 bit i386 Linux host guesting what I assume is
> 32 bit Windows taken from the quick start pages from the qemu web pages
> are as follows:
>
> ************************************
>
> Windows guest on Linux host
>
> 1. Download QEMU Binary distribution for linux-i386 and install it.
> Installation is simply done by extracting the contents of the tar
> archive in root directory ("/"). It will extract its contents to
> /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share.
>
> (In Debian I will just install the qemu package with synaptic).
Exactly.
> 2. You need a blank disk image ("harddisk"). This is like adding a blank
> disk to the virtual computer that QEMU creates. Use qemu-img to create a
> 3Gb blank disk image:
>
> qemu-img create -f qcow c.img 3G
>
> The last argument is the size of the image (3G). This 3G will be the
> maximum end size of the image file. It will grow while adding contents
> (writing files to the harddisk). A fresh WinXP installation will use
> e.g. ~1.7Gb. For more information on creating a blank image see Disk
> Images.
>
> 3. When you install an OS on a real computer you normally boot an
> installation CD/DVD or an existing image. We'll do the same with the
> virtual computer. Here you have two options: Either you use a real
> installation CD/DVD or you have an install ISO image. Depending on this,
> the next steps are slightly different.
>
> * If you have an installation CD, put the CD (e.g. Windows installation
> CD) into the real CD drive of your host computer. Then run
>
> qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda c.img -m 256 -boot d
> Would these commands work OK in the AMD64 world?
Yes, they are exactly the same.
> Your comments on the merits of qemuctl and qemu-launcher would be
> appreciated.
I have not tried these.
You may want to consider installing kqemu as well. It is a kernel-module
that speeds up the emulation significantly, however you have to built
parts of it yourself (just like the nvidia-driver, in case you have done
that before). Note that if you plan on using Windows XP, you have to
make that decision before you install it, otherwise you will have to
re-activate it once you enable kqemu (I had to call in for that),
because it shows itself as a different processor to the emulated OS.
Regards,
Mike
--
Michael Hansen - http://www.pfna.de/
Monheim / Germany
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