Flashing base images (QEMU)#

You will need…

a Linux computer

There is no need to flash the image for QEMU platform. We suggest using libvirt for this.

If you haven’t installed QEMU yet, please install the following packages

Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 21.10, 22.04, Debian 10, Debian 11
CentOS stream 8, stream 9, RHEL 8, 9

sudo apt install qemu-system libvirt-daemon-system virtinst virt-viewer

sudo yum install qemu-kvm libvirt virt-install virt-viewer

Setup#

To fully enable QEMU, please perform the following operations.

Add user to libvirt group:

sudo adduser $USER libvirt

Start default network if not already started:

sudo virsh net-list --all
sudo virsh net-start default # only if network 'default' is inactive

New user session required

After this, a logout out of your current user session is required.

How to create the VM#

Extract the QEMU libvirt bundle that can be found in our Base image downloads section.

Note

Another option is to use scotty to build simplecore-simpleswitch-os-image, a console only image, or simplecore-simpleswitch-os-weston-image, a graphic image and create your own bundle, as documented in our libvirt VM bundle tool section.

non-graphical image
graphical image

mkdir -p simpleswitch-vm
tar -xf bundle-02_qemux86-64-simpleswitch-os-simplecore-simpleswitch-os-image.bz2 -C simpleswitch-vm
cd simpleswitch && ./scotty_vm_create.sh

mkdir -p simpleswitch-vm
tar -xf bundle-02_qemux86-64-simpleswitch-os-simplecore-simpleswitch-os-weston-image.bz -C simpleswitch-vm
cd simpleswitch-vm && ./scotty_vm_create.sh

Note

One can pass option -s to scotty_vm_create.sh in order to create a shared folder <image_name>_apps/ between the QEMU VM and the host. This folder can be used to deploy SimpleSwitch™ containers on the QEMU VM.