kvm

temporarily speeding up IO performance for KVM VM

by .pQd
i have few VMs running on top of spinning rust. recently i’ve upgraded one of them to not-yet-stable debian bookworm. upgrade would be pretty slow but.. i’ve edited the VM definition and asked KVM to allow host server to cache any IO operations. speedup was great, bullseye->bookworm upgrade finished in less than 5 minutes. for ... Read More

booting KVM VM from an iso image

by .pQd
let’s say you have a vm, maybe with debian. and that vm stopped booting, maybe because of grub corruption. what do you do? add under devices – for pc-i440fx arch: and for pc-q35-3.1: then in the os section change boot from dev=’hd’ to dev=’cdrom’: then also – this article describes how to go back from ... Read More

“error: internal error: unable to execute QEMU command ‘transaction’: Could not create file: Permission denied” when creating a snapshot under KVM

by .pQd
debian buster brings apparmor. apparmor brings problems – eg it’s too restrictive for libvirt KVM guests and does not allow KVM to create snapshot-related files in VM’s folders. so far i did not find a clean and generic way to address it so i had to disable apparmor for libvirt by adding security_driver = “none” ... Read More

kvm: disabled by bios

by .pQd
does your kvm VM feel sluggish? mine did feel pretty slow.. as it turned out virt-install quietly overrode ‘hvm’ preferences and created a fully emulated qemu vm when it failed to make use of hardware-assisted virtualization.