Source
r/linux•
zuoken

Anyone able to get Moblin to run on kvm?

Moblin is super cute, so I wanted to give it a spin.

I thought VMs might be the best route, so I enabled virtualization in my bios, made sure kvm and qemu were installed, and tried to run Moblin's install CD. It hanged when it tried to install. Can anyone get it to install?

Desperate, I checked the developer's mailing list, where I learned that they thought virtualizing Moblin would result in a bad experience because it's heavily dependent on 3d graphics cards, which VMs in general don't support. So even if Moblin would install, the lack of a 3d driver would make it a pain to use. However, I read about a project from 2007 called vmgl that claims it can get opengl graphics working in a VM, but it's not supported by a package in Ubuntu.

So to sum up my post, how do you get (1) Moblin to install in kvm in Ubuntu, and (2) how do you get 3d hardware support in kvm for it? Should I just give up?

Posted Oct 1, 2009, 2:00 PM UTC

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zuokenOP•

Btw, I was following these instructions from Moblin's website (I was also using the command kvm instead of qemu-kvm):

Create a virtual disk (ex. vdisk.img) using QEMU command:

qemu-img create vdisk.img -f qcow2 4G

Install moblin image in the virtual disk, assuming “moblin.img” and “vdisk.img” are both in the same/current directory. Note that the title of VM window should be "QEMU/KVM", not "QEMU":

sudo qemu-kvm -no-acpi -m 384 -hda moblin.img -hdb vdisk.img -boot c

Close VM window after successful installation. To run the newly installed moblin2 image in the VM:

sudo qemu-kvm -no-acpi -m 384 -hda vdisk.img -boot c
1
[deleted]•

I had problems with the graphics too as it requires at least an i945 chipset to work as far as I'm aware. That's the official Intel build anyway from Moblin.org

...However there is now the Ubuntu Moblin Remix which doesn't have these optimisations so you might get by. I ran it to some extent but in Virtualbox with 3D support enabled. I haven't got the link to hand but it's usually available on the normal Ubuntu mirrors.

1
zuokenOP•

Well that's just silly. Isn't the point of a VM to emulate the required hardware? Shouldn't kvm translate the i945 chipset calls into something my computer would understand? Ah well... perhaps it's too computationally expensive, or the KVM developers haven't gotten around to writing the necessary code.

Thanks, I'll try the Ubuntu Moblin Remix.

0
[deleted]•

If you look through the documentation, everything in the VM is a specific device being emulated. You should have a standard VGA device or a Cirrus Logic chip. Your sound card is likely either some ISA card or a Sound Blaster 16. The long and short of it is that despite the advances into hypervisor CPU stuff that allows native code execution, most other things are still fully emulated devices.

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neoice•

is there a reason you tried KVM instead of something like VirtualBox?

1
zuokenOP•

KVM is part of the linux kernel, so I figured I might as well use it if the linux developers thought it worthy of including.

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