[Qemu-discuss] Booting GUI ubuntu VM on Aarch64

[Yehuda Yitschak]

Hello Everyone

 

I am trying to boot a VM using Ubuntu-15.04 and get a GUI view of the OS.

 

My setup is as follows:

·         I boot a linux-4.1 KVM hypervisor using Ubuntu 15.04 on a headless embedded board (no VGA card)

·         I start a VNC server on the board and connect from a desktop to the VNC session. I get a xubuntu desktop then

·         On the Ubuntu desktop I open an Xterm window and try to boot a guest with a copy of the same Ubuntu 15.04 file system.

 

A few things happen:

·         Qemu open directly to the QEMU console. When I switch to the guest (alt + ctl + shift + 2) I get the console boot of the guest.

·         The quest reaches console login but during the OS service startup phase I notice that lightdm service fails to start. It starts and stops for 4-5 times before it gives up.

·         If I run “startx” in the guests console I get an Error “(EE) no screens found”

 

From what I can gather it looks like QEMU is not generating a screen for the guest to work with. I understood that QEMU uses SDL to start a screen for the guest but I suspect that doesn’t happen for some reason. Also the fact that the Qemu window start in the console instead of SDL view looks strange.

 

I am using qemu-system-aarch64 version 2.2.0 installed from Ubuntu repositories.

Maybe this image was built without SDL support ?

 

My VM boot command line is:

qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm -kernel /root/virt/Image -m 512 -M virt -cpu host -drive file=/root/virt/ubuntu-virt-15.04.img,id=fs -device virtio-blk-device,drive=fs -netdev type=tap,id=net0,script=no,downscript=no,ifname="tap0" -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 -append "earlyprintk console=ttyAMA0 rootwait root=/dev/vda rw"

 

Any suggestion is much appreciated

 

Thanks !

 

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Yehuda Yitschak

Marvell Semiconductor Ltd.