QEMU on BSD hosts

This documentation is not written by a BSD expert - corrections welcome!

QEMU can be built on BSD hosts. At the moment most QEMU developers are Linux users, though, so BSD is not very well supported.

This page includes documentation of how to get the various BSD flavours running in a VM inside QEMU, so that Linux-based developers can do build tests on them. If you're running natively on BSD you can ignore the "VM setup" instructions.

FreeBSD

VM setup

Download and uncompress the official FreeBSD qcow2 image from

https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/11.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/

Run the image with:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2048 -hda FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2 -enable-kvm -netdev user,id=mynet0,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:7722-:22 -device e1000,netdev=mynet0

(TODO: check virtio works and recommend that instead.)

Enable networking and ssh by adding these lines to /etc/rc.conf:

sshd_enable="YES"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to add

PermitRootLogin prohibit-password

and then reboot the VM or run

service netif restart
service sshd start

Copy your ssh public key into the VM's /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

You should now be able to ssh into the VM from outside with

ssh -p 7722 root@localhost

Required packages

Install enough packages to do builds:

 pkg update
 pkg install git
 pkg install gcc
 pkg install gmake
 pkg install python
 pkg install pkgconf
 pkg install pixman
 pkg install bison

This should be enough to configure and build QEMU as you would on Linux:

 mkdir build
 cd build
 ../configure
 gmake
 gmake check

Note that you need to use 'gmake', not plain 'make'.