I have a fresh install of Fedora 35 on a lab machine. I want to run a virtual machine on it. I have ssh access to the root account and a public key copied over.
The packages you need are listed below:
dnf install libvirt libvirt-daemon-kvm qemu-kvm virt-install |
Run the daemon, and make sure it runs on startup
systemctl enable libvirtd
systemctl start libvirtd |
You can do a simple test to see if it is ready with:
virt-install --name centos8-2 --memory 10240 --vcpus=2 --os-type=Linux --os-variant=centos7.0 |
If it is OK, you will either get a vm, or a message like:
ERROR The requested volume capacity will exceed the available pool space when the volume is fully allocated. (20480 M requested capacity > 12728 M available) (Use –check disk_size=off or –check all=off to override)Below are my notes from debugging a new setup. Before I had the libvirt-daemon-kvm and qemu-kvm packages installed, I got the error:
ERROR Host does not support any virtualization options |
Looking at the CPU info:
# lscpu Architecture: aarch64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 80 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-79 Vendor ID: ARM BIOS Vendor ID: Ampere(R) Model name: Neoverse-N1 BIOS Model name: Ampere(R) Altra(R) Processor Model: 1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 80 Socket(s): 1 Stepping: r3p1 Frequency boost: disabled CPU max MHz: 3000.0000 CPU min MHz: 1000.0000 BogoMIPS: 50.00 Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs |
Note that you will not see the virtualization extensions listed that are x86_64 specific. On a x86_64 system, you can find them with
egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo |
But they are not defined in the ARM64 headers in the Linux Kernel. The only way I’ve found thus far is to look in the journal:
# journalctl | grep EL2 Feb 01 07:20:14 eng14sys-r111.scc-lab.amperecomputing.com kernel: CPU: All CPU(s) started at EL2 |
I tried to get an Ampere system into my lab about 18 months back, but they didn’t have any to spare for their developer program. Has that changed? I’d like to adapt my VM templates to ARM but I need the hardware first. I’ve been hoping something would show up on eBay at bargain prices but so far no luck.
You might find this repo useful, if you want to make your own VM images:
https://github.com/AmpereComputing/packer-aarch64-templates
The second Ampere system showed up on eBay this week, but the 5K is about 5K above our budget.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334321120173