Skip to content

Qemu/KVM + Windows

In order to use certain software, I have to prepare myself a win10 virtual machine. However, common virtual machine software (VMWare / Parallel Desktop) has no Linux support, while VirtualBox is not powerful enough. That drives me to an alternative: QEMU-KVM.

This note shows how to successfully run Win10 as a guest in QEMU-KVM. I will not be too hacky and most steps are done with GUI support.

The host system:

  • OS: Linux Mint
  • Intel VT-x enabled

Prerequisites

The first step is to install the the required packages.

sudo apt install qemu-system libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager virt-viewer spice-vdagent

Note: Different Linux distro may has different package name.

After the installation is finished, you may have to reboot your machine to enable KVM connection. And libvirt will also create a default virbr0 bridge interface.

Then you will have to download a Win10 installation images.

Last is a win10-virtio driver pack maintained by fedora, check here to download the latest version.

Create a New Virtual Machine

Open Virtual Machine Manager, select create a new virtual machine.

Then select local install media.

Load the local Win10 media and enter the target operating system: Microsoft Windows 10.

Adjust CPUs and memory allocation according to your own machine.

Load storage volume as your whole disk storage. Here you can create either a qcow2 format volume or a raw image (with an img suffix). I choose raw image since it is more speedy than qcow2 format. If you prefer a snapshot support, select qcow2 format.

Finally, check Customize configuration before install and finish.

Customize Configuration Before Install

In Display Spice tab, change Type from Spice to VNC.

Here, you may wonder how to judge between the network sources. If you want your Win10 guest be accessible by the devices outside your host network, you may refer to Bridge mode. If not, an NAT network by default is just fine.

Note: Win10 does not support virtio as net card by default. After installation, you should install the virtio net card driver manually.

Click Add Hardware, and at the first entry: Storage, load your previously downloaded virtio-win-*.*.***.iso image as CDROM device, as the following image shows.

The last customization is to adjust the boot option. Top one is SATA CDROM 1 (the main storage), sequenced by VirtIO Disk 1 (win10 installation image).

After all these customization, click Begin Installation and here we shall go!

Win10 Setup

During the ordinary setup of Win10, you will see a page where no available storage is prompted. Here you should load the drivers manually.

Then select E:\amd64\w10\viostor.inf.

We can proceed and finish Win10 installation. When you see the classic Windows desktop, right click on the Win button and select Device Manager.

Expand Other Devices and right click on Ehternet Driver, update the device driver.

And here, we have successfully run a Win10 in QEMU-KVM!