Testing the latest images wth qemu-system-x86

Help
#1

Debian 9 on Xiaomi Air 13"

when I download various latest 64 bits anyboot images, extract the iso and launch

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom haiku-nightly-anyboot.iso

It fails with
Haiku: Panic: did not find boot partitions

with some older iso like
hrev52300

it boots, displays the seven images of the Haiku logo, and hangs

Thanks for any hint

#2

Hi! Welcome to Haiku.

Well firstly, as a guy who runs qemu often, why invoke sudo? On Haiku, you don’t need it, and on Debian Gnu/Linux (which I’m seeing you’re using as a host) you also shouldn’t need it here. If it’s kvm acceleration you need, create a kvm group and add yourself to it – if your distro didn’t do that for you anyway. You shouldn’t need sudo unless you’re doing something like accessing raw volumes, such as -hdb /dev/sdc, for instance.

Now, the other thing is that you’re starting qemu in full ‘automatic’ with no options, like cpu, etc. That’s fine, but you will need to specify a few important options to it:

  • -m 1G: While Haiku can get by with very little memory due to its excellent design, I usually give it plenty just in case I want to run a lot of applications inside a session. (The default amount, iirc, is 128 MB, which probably won’t get the 64-bit edition up.)
  • –enable-kvm. Hint: There’s two dashes here. If you’ve got hardware acceleration with kernel virtualization support on your distro, use it.
  • -boot d: If you’re booting from a CD-ROM, it’ll most likely guess this one like the other options, but this might just help.

Also, hrev52300 is not all that old. The current Nightly is 52302 as of this writing; the x64 Nightlies page is here.

#3

thanks

using

 qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -m 1G -cdrom haiku-nightly-anyboot.iso

it boots fine

#4

qemu-system-x86_64 --cdrom haiku-release-anyboot.iso -m 2048 --enable-kvm --usb -device usb-tablet is a good combo. The usb-tablet emulation makes the mouse a lot easier to use in qemu.

#5

Definitely agree with the -device usb-tablet suggestion. I’d forgotten about that one. Also, exporting SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 in your shell window before running qemu on Debian may help as well. I’ve also found using a trackpoint or nub works better than a trackpad for moving the mouse pointer in virtual environments.