Re: Some qemu+hurd questions

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 09:14:33AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:

> Installation went well, apt and grub2 work perfectly, however
> extremely slow, several hours for the installation.

Yes, that's expected -- pure qemu has to simulate all code execution,
and thus causes a slowdown of about an order of magnitude compared to
native execution. And the Hurd isn't terribly efficient to begin with...

> - How to shut down Hurd in qemu properly? Just closing the qemu window
> hurd complained on an unclean shutdown and had to check disks. The
> solution I found so far is to shut down Hurd as root in the qemu
> window before closing the window. 

Yes, you have to shut down the system in the virtual machine, just like
any system running on real hardware... That's not Hurd-specific in any
way.

> - When installing Hurd, no Swedish locale was found, I used the
> default. The problem is that the US keyboard is used by qemu+hurd,
> while I have a Swedish keyboard. It is very difficult to type
> correctly since common characters are at strange positions, e.g. - is
> /, <shift>* is |, ö is :, etc. How do I get a Swedish keyboard mapping
> working in qemu+hurd? 

There is a page in the Hurd wiki about this IIRC. Most probably you will
have to use the "Hurd console" (rather than the default "Mach console")
with the xkb driver.

> - qemu seems to grab the mouse when clicking on the window, making it
> impossible to copy text from that window somewhere else. Is that
> solvable?

Qemu runs in graphics mode by default. If you don't intend to do any
graphical stuff in the virtual system, you can run it in a terminal with
the ncurses driver instead, in which case copy&paste should work.

> - qemu-kvm is also available in addition to qemu. Would things be
> faster with it, there seems to be some kernel modules added?

Yes, KVM is considerably faster, as it can run most code natively.

Some people reported issues with Hurd and KVM though recently...

> Does my CPU, see below, support virtualisation?

Nope, too old :-(

You can try Xen or VirtualBox though. Both are faster than pure Qemu.
(Xen is faster than VirtualBox, but harder to set up.)

> - Availability of Emacs, Arch Hurd has a working version, not Debian.

You can probably find older working packages on http://snapshot.debian.org .

> I have only 512M memory on the box. Is that too little to run
> Linux+Hurd simultaneously?

It is enough for basic experiments; but it won't be much fun for more
serious use... 512 MiB is pretty low nowadays for a desktop system --
even with only a single OS.

-antrik-