Using QEMU as you use Virtualbox

English Virtualization
1

I created some sort of manual about “Using QEMU as you use Virtualbox”

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/551824-qemu-kvm-user-management-create-launch-create-a-bridge-use-a-bridge

This is a manual closer to a beginner than any technical documentation you can find at qemu.org or other sources, where the references are too much general.
Today I discovered a project “quickemu” which aims “to replace Virtualbox with Bash & Qemu”

https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Just name The OS you want to virtualize and that’s it.

You use remote console as SPICE or SPICY to dialog with the VM.

You can share files and usb devices between host and guest without any elevated permission.

You get hardware acceleration for graphics (Virgl)

There is a manual mode for OS not already implemented, using the ISO file.

I did not explore and experiment this tool.

I would want to find this tool when I begin my project “Using QEMU as you use Virtualbox”.

Furthermore, I wish openSUSE supplies a rpm of this project.

This is the introduction of the project :

Quickly create and run highly optimised desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; with just two commands. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you. For example:
quickget ubuntu-mate 21.10
quickemu --vm ubuntu-mate-21.10-.conf

The original objective of the project was to enable quick testing of Linux distributions where the virtual machine configurations can be stored anywhere, such as external USB storage or your home directory, and no elevated permissions are required to run the virtual machines. Quickemu now also includes comprehensive support for macOS and Windows.
Features

  • macOS
    Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave & High Sierra - Windows
    8.1, 10 and 11 including TPM 2.0 - Ubuntu and all the official Ubuntu flavours
  • Over 360 operating system editions are supported!
  • Full SPICE support including host/guest clipboard sharing
  • VirtIO-webdavd file sharing for Linux and Windows guests
  • VirtIO-9p file sharing for Linux and macOS guests
  • QEMU Guest Agent support; provides access to a system-level agent via standard QMP commands
  • Samba file sharing for Linux, macOS and Windows guests (if smbd is installed on the host
    ) - VirGL acceleration
  • USB device pass-through
  • Smartcard pass-through
  • Automatic SSH port forwarding to guests
  • Network port forwarding
  • Full duplex audio
  • Braille support
  • EFI (with or without SecureBoot) and Legacy BIOS boot
  • Graphical user interfaces available

Quickemu is a wrapper for the excellent QEMU that attempts to automatically “do the right thing”, rather than expose exhaustive configuration options.

2

What’s wrong with virt-manager? That is probably as close as you can get to virtualbox and it ties in with libvirtd. That seems easier to me than replacing plain cli qemu calls with a cli wrapper. While the list of presets on quickemu looks impressive, there is hardly any need for that range of systems outside of a testing lab. I usually have only three VM templates around: one is for Linux (current prod and upcoming next) as a base for kubernetes clusters and another one is the odd windows VM which I fire up once a year or so. For automated provisioning of non-Windows VMs at home, I prefer terraform with libvirt backend. But whatever suits your needs, go for quickemu.

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