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Course Outline

Day 1

  • An overview of the virtualization ecosystem
  • The history of QEMU development
  • CPU features essential for virtualization
  • Installing QEMU via packages
  • Compiling and installing QEMU from source
  • Full-system emulation capabilities
  • Navigating the QEMU console
  • Available machine types and peripheral devices
  • Understanding VirtIO
  • Guest drivers
  • Disk image formats
  • Managing virtual machine snapshots
  • Networking configurations for virtual machines
  • Graphics adapters
  • Audio devices
  • Nested virtualization
  • User-level emulation
  • Registering foreign binaries using binfmt-misc
  • Cross-architecture chroots and containers

Day 2

  • The role of Libvirt within the virtualization ecosystem
  • Supported hypervisors and container technologies
  • QEMU Machine Protocol (QMP)
  • Running QEMU in headless mode
  • Utilizing the QXL video card and SPICE display
  • Available SPICE viewers
  • Creating virtual machines using the "virt-install" and "virt-clone" command-line tools
  • Managing and running virtual machines via the "virt-manager" graphical interface
  • Editing virtual machine configurations and libvirt settings with the low-level "virsh" tool
  • Manipulating disk image contents using libguestfs tools (guestfish, virt-sysprep)
  • Networking and firewall management in libvirt
  • Remote access to libvirt
  • Overview of web-based frontends for libvirt
  • Key highlights from recent KVM-related conferences

Bonus topics available exclusively in classroom settings (note: only descriptions, not demonstrations, are provided for remote courses):

  • Running Mac OS X under KVM (requires at least one participant to have a Mac with Linux installed)
  • 3D graphics support via VirGL
  • 3D graphics using Intel GPUs (Broadwell, Skylake, or early Kaby Lake families, i.e., 5th to 7th generation, excluding later models) with igvtg, or the equivalent "mediated passthrough" for NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla cards
  • Video card passthrough (requires a desktop setup with two video cards, ideally AMD)
  • USB device pass-through

Requirements

Proficiency in general Linux command-line operations and a working knowledge of TCP/IP networking

 14 Hours

Testimonials (3)

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