Below you will find a summary of how-to generate a virtual environment from a system configuration file. If you would like to learn more about different virtualization software, and how-to install and use them, please continue here: qemu / docker

QEMU

Run as live machine

Using Guix as host, we can generate a shell script that runs Guix based on a system configuration file. later we can pass QEMU parameters to this generated script.

$ guix system vm /path/to/config.scm
...
/gnu/store/...-run-vm.sh
$ /gnu/store/…-run-vm.sh -m 1024 -smp 2 -net user,model=virtio-net-pci

running the above script, we have a QEMU instance, that boots to an instance of Guix defined by our configuration file.

Prepare permanent disk image

alternatively we can generate a disk image in QCOW2 format, containing Guix instance installed on match with our provided configuration file.

$ guix system vm-image /path/to/config.scm
...
/gnu/store/...-qemu-image

later we can run this image using qemu.

$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -nic user,model=virtio-net-pci \
    -enable-kvm -m 1024 \
    -device virtio-blk,drive=myhd \
    -drive if=none,file=/path/to/...-qemu-image,id=myhd

Notes about running VM

running the disk image there are a series of items that we need to consider:

generated disk image will be saved in store, and since store is a read-only location, we need to copy that to some other place and assign write permission before we can use generated image.
default image generated using guix system vm-image usually doesn’t have enough space for additional files and packages to store/install. so if we need more space, we should pass our desired size using --image-size parameter.

$ guix system vm-image /path/to/config.scm --image-size=10G

in order to have ssh access to the virtual machine, we need to forward default ssh port of the guest machine to some other port in host using hostfwt parameter of QEMU:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -nic user,model=virtio-net-pci,hostfwd=tcp::10022-:22 ...

later we can connect to guest machine using ssh client:

$ ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p 10022 root@127.0.0.1

Useful QEMU tricks

switch VTERM on guest OS

in order to switch to other virtual TTY in guest os, we need to switch to monitoring console of QEMU using ctrl+alt+2 and send our key combination using sendkey command:

sendkey ctrl-alt-f2

later we can switch back to default console using ctrl+alt+1 command.

Docker

TODO

Virtualization