* On 2020 12 Feb 18:08 -0600, Dennis Wicks wrote: > Greetings; > > The last time that I ran any virtual systems virtualbox and other software > was the only way to go. Now I see that there is support in hardware for > running virtual systems directly. I am running Buster on AMD Ryzen. What is > the best way to run virtual systems, and where can I find some good doc? The > first thing I need to run is Windows 10 so I can get my taxes done! Then > maybe a couple of small Debian and Windows systems for testing and > development of WP thems and websites and similar.
For Windows, VirtualBox is probably your best bet. Trouble is that it is officially not available for Buster but an unofficial set of packages may be found at: https://people.debian.org/~lucas/virtualbox-buster/ Otherwise I like running a Qemu VM from a shell script that contains the commandline switches needed. I did try Windows XP and ReactOS in Qemu and for each over time the area the mouse would work in within the VM GUI would get smaller and smaller. VBoxHeadless works well called from a cron job. I've done this for years to start up a Debian VM that several minutes has its own cron job that rolls up a daily snapshot of a project's master branch and then does MinGW 32 and 64 bit builds of the project for Windows. The nice thing is that VBoxHeadless doesn't need a terminal attachment. A bit of experimentation shows that I may be to do the same with Qemu by passing the -nographic option and directing stdout and stderr to /dev/null. So long as Vbox packages are available I'll stick with it for the moment. Virtual Box has a nice way to set up shared directories between the host and guest VM so long as the VB Guest Additions are installed in the guest and vbox kernel drivers are installed into the host's kernel. As I am using secure boot I have to sing these modules and have a script that does that. For shared directories between the host and guest with Qemu I simply use sshfs with public key authentication. As the intended use of the key is strictly between the host and the guest, I've set them up with no password so this aspect can be automated at some point. With Qemu custom kernel modules are not needed so specially signing modules for a secure boot kernel is not needed. Both technologies are quite good these days. I recall first playing with VMs in 2005 with Virtual PC on Windows XP on a Thinkpad T42 provided by work for an A+ certification class. They were slow. Later on Virtual Box became available and I've been using it ever since for various tasks. Now Qemu may take that role due to Debian packaging needs. - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: https://www.n0nb.us Projects: https://github.com/N0NB GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819
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