qemu-windows-10

Some notes and a starter script on getting a Windows 10 guest running on a Debian 10 host using QEMU 3.1.0.

Note: Still a work in progress. See start.sh for the script.

Table of Contents

1. Hardware Requirements
2. Software Requirements
3. Software Configuration
4. Configuring the VM
   1. USB Devices
   2. Audio
   3. CPU-pinning with taskset
   4. Some Possible Performance Improvements
      1. hugepages
      2. Force Windows to use MSI on GPU
5. Running the VM
6. TODO
   1. File Sharing with Samba
   2. BIOS/UEFI boot priority
7. Resources
8. LICENSE

Hardware Requirements

The main thing you need is VT-d support on your processor.

I have a dedicated GPU and HDD for Windows. If you plan on sharing the GPU or using a filesystem container, tweak the configuration as needed.

It's useful to have a separate keyboard/mouse for Windows' exclusive use, but not necessary. If you only have one kb/m, the Windows guest will "take" it while it's running, and then "release" it once it's shutdown. This can be inconvenient if you're still tweaking the config.

Software Requirements

• Linux kernel 4.1+ (vfio, iommu support)
• qemu-kvm
• ovmf (latest tarball from Fedora's website?)
• hugepages
• virtio-win.iso

Some guides and tutorials will use virt-manager. Since my Linux install is rather lean, I've done all of the configuration by hand (and won't cover virt-manager here).

Software Configuration

Note: section is incomplete.

/etc/default/grub (then run update-grub):

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on"

/etc/modules:

vfio
vfio_iommu_type1
vfio_pci
kvm
kvm_intel

Generally your GPU will have two device IDs under lspci, the "VGA Compatible Controller" and an associated "Audio device". Passing both is useful, especially if you want to use audio passthrough with HDMI or DisplayPort.

/etc/modprobe.d/vfio-pci.conf:

options vfio-pci ids=YOUR_IDS_HERE

Configuring the VM

Configure the options for your VM in start.sh before attempting to run it.

This script is highly dependent on your hardware and host OS, and it's advisable to go through it line-by-line to understand what options you're passing to QEMU.

USB Devices

The old way of using -usbdevice has been deprecated. See the script or QEMU/USB Quick Start for more details on specifying USB devices.

Ideally, use the qemu-xhci controller device (qemu-2.10+) to minimize CPU overhead, but the current version on Debian Stretch is qemu-2.8, requiring the use of nec-usb-xhci--not sure of what the performance impact is.

If you don't specify a USB host controller, QEMU defaults to a slower (I think) one.

This can be problematic in non-obvious ways: for example, if you wanted to connect and use an Xbox Controller for Windows, Windows 10 might recognize and install drivers for the Xbox Controller but won't initialize it properly (Code 10). This can be resolved by specifying an XHCI or EHCI controller and attaching it to that bus (on this particular Reddit thread, an EHCI/USB-2.0 only controller needed to be specified).

References:

• QEMU/USB Quick Start
• QEMU USB Controllers

Audio

Getting audio working on the guest was a bit tricky. You might face some issues with scratchy, delayed, or even loss of sound, most of which I won't cover here since I did not experience it.

There are different ways to do audio:

1. guest passes through audio to host setup: I attempted to set this up, but this solution seemed to introduce additional problems. It might work well if you have audio working properly on the host OS.
2. PCIe soundcard passthrough: untested.
3. HDMI/DP-passthrough (via graphics card): seems to work well, but I am using the DVI output of my graphics card.
4. USB headset or USB sound card passthrough: this worked the best and what I currently use.

Note: Having multiple sound devices (#3 and #4) seemed to result in audio intermittently working, with either lots of lag or no sound at all.

There is some issue with drivers, latency, audio buffers, and timing, but what I found solved this issue was to have only one device enabled in the start script at one time. In my case, I disabled passing through the audio device on the graphics card and only passed through the USB headset: all works well now.

CPU-pinning with taskset

Set aside various cores for the guest OS.

You'll want to be mindful of any additional computations on the host or other VMs that aren't pinned. For example, if you run a heavy job on the host without specifying which CPUs it should or shouldn't use, you'll start sharing with the Windows 10 guest, leading to terrible performance on the guest.

See the script for some details.

Some Possible Performance Improvements

The following sections are some configuration settings that I use. These are likely optional, with perhaps some minor increases in performance (less than 10%?).

Documentation here is a bit incomplete.

hugepages

We can use hugepages to reserve a certain amount of RAM for the guest's exclusive use.

apt install libhugetlbfs-bin
hugeadm --explain

Configure number of pages to reserve in /etc/sysctl.conf:

# If guest has 16GiB of memory, 16GiB / 2MiB = 8192 pages.
# Add ~5% overhead (YMMV) => 8600 pages.
#
# If you don't add any overhead, Windows will sometimes blue screen if
# it uses up all of its available memory.
vm.nr_hugepages = 8600
vm.hugetlb_shm_group = 1001

Display hugepages configuration, and set recommended settings:

hugeadm --explain
hugeadm --set-recommended-min_free_kbytes --set-recommended-shmmax

Force Windows to use MSI on GPU

Increased performance. Some documentation.

MSI supported, but not enabled:

# lspci -v -s 2:00.0
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        ...
        Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        ...
        Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
        Kernel modules: nouveau

MSI supported, and enabled in Windows 10 guest:

# lspci -v -s 2:00.0
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 3GB] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        ...
        Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        ...
        Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
        Kernel modules: nouveau

Running the VM

start.sh

Run as root. There is a way to run it as a less-privileged user, but I haven't gotten around to configuring that yet.

Load the Windows 10 installation ISO and virtio-win.iso as options passed to -cdrom for the initial install, then comment those lines out on subsequent reboots (after the Windows installation is complete).

In the Windows 10 install process, you might need to load device drivers before it recognizes your disks.

TODO

Sections I haven't quite fully documented.

• file sharing
• BIOS/UEFI boot priority

File Sharing with Samba

QEMU spins up a temporary Samba allowing access to only the guest using a configuration located at /tmp/qemu-smb.${RANDOM}/smb.conf.

There doesn't seem to be a good way to configure the Samba share with anything more complex than one folder.

Although not recommended, you could modify the ephemeral config after the guest has started and reload smbd.

If you need finer controls in file sharing, it seems best to run a proper Samba config and restrict access to the loopback interface for guest-OS-only access.

BIOS/UEFI boot priority

If you install Windows directly to another disk (without using a container), the BIOS/UEFI will detect it as a possible boot device and attempt to load it.

My workaround is to ensure that the BIOS setting ignores the hard drive that Windows is on. On occasion after some hardware changes, Windows will be loaded directly.

Resources

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
• https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

LICENSE

CC0-1.0 / CC0-1.0 Universal