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Re: kvm customized /etc/ file?



On 2025-11-14 at 11:10, Franco Martelli wrote:

> On 14/11/25 at 16:01, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> 
>> You gave me an idea, so I went:
>> 
>> strace -f -o /tmp/trace qemu ...
>> 
>> (yes, I had a qemu hanging around in my history. It is qemu-kvm, so
>> it might be a close cousin).

I actually just noticed that

$ man -k qemu

returns, among other things, the line:

kvm (1)              - QEMU User Documentation

So the 'kvm' command appears to in fact be part of qemu.

And indeed:

$ which kvm
/usr/bin/kvm
$ dlocate /bin/kvm
qemu-system-x86: /usr/bin/kvm

>> Looking at the opens, I see one potential config:
>> 
>> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/qemu/qemu.conf", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No
>> such file or directory)
>> 
>> It's a system config, but might be a start 🙂
>> 
>> No manpage for qemu.conf, alas.
>> 
>> @Franco: perhaps you could try a similar trick?
> 
> This was what I wanted to do, but without documentation about what
> the qemu.conf file should contain it is not possible to accomplish
> that.

It'd definitely be better to have documentation of the format of the
file (and I'd want to look online to see if the project has made any
available anywhere), but in the absence of such, I'd be tempted to try
two things.

The first is key=value pairs. That is, set up the file with one option
per line, and the option name as the first thing on the line, followed
by an equals sign, followed by whatever arguments you'd have passed to
that option. (I'm not sure what would need to be after the equals sign
for "flag"-type options which don't take an argument; that would need
experimentation.)

The second is literal option strings. That is, whatever you'd put on the
command line after the executable name, put that same thing in the
config file - including the '-' prefixes. Whether to put it all on one
line, or split it into multiple, is another thing that would have to be
experimented with.

Then once you have a file set up one of those ways, try loading it with
'-readconfig [filename]', and see whether it works as intended.


If you're not comfortable doing that, or if you do it and it doesn't
work, you'll probably need to ask on a KVM- or qemu-specific forum of
some type; those who have responded here thus far, including myself,
don't seem to have the knowledge to be able to advise you on it.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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