Subject: bug#24943: Error when starting a vm-image in qemu

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2016 11:08:40 +0100

[email-masked] skribis:

> I've recently created a VM using guix system vm-image using
>
> $ guix system vm-image --image-size=16G ~/doc/vimwiki/liveusb-guix-sys-conf.wiki
>
> (I will attach the conf file later on). After copying the image to $HOME and
> changing perms to 0600, I tried running it using:
>
> history | grep qemu-system
>   501  qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -cpu host -net nic -net user -usb -usbdevice tablet guix-img.qcow 
>   502  qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -cpu host -net help -net user -usb -usbdevice tablet guix-img.qcow 
>   505  qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -cpu host -usb -usbdevice tablet guix-img.qcow 
>
> and in each instance, the system failed to boot (screenshots should be attached
> in .png format). The error was related to the network interface. Especially with
> command 505, I'd have expected that to resolve the issue since there was no
> network interface, but it didn't fix things. Image error.png is the output, and
> error2.png is the backtrace (,bt from the prompt).

‘guix system vm-image’ produces an image that expects QEMU’s networking
interface available as eth0 inside the host, hence the error you were
getting.

To enable that, I think you need to do:

  qemu-system-x86_64 -net user -net nic,model=virtio …

See:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Running-GuixSD-in-a-VM.html

Could you try and report back?

Thanks,
Ludo’.