Subject: Re: [bug#41785] [PATCH] DRAFT services: Add 'hurd-in-vm service-type'.

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 21:43:28 +0200

Hi,

Mathieu Othacehe <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Just to clarify things here, we now have the "disk-image" command that
> produces a Hurd bootable disk-image. The "vm-image" command is almost
> working, and should produce a very similar result.
>
> The "vm" command that produces a vm-image and spawns a VM isn't working
> yet with the Hurd. This command is for now passing directly "kernel" and
> "initrd" arguments to QEMU, so a few adaptations will be needed.
>
> Now the goad of hurd-in-vm-service-type is to provide a service that
> does almost the same thing as the "vm" command, but as a service, right?

That’s my understanding.

> So, I don't get why would we need to run a Hurd VM inside a VM. I've
> been struggling a lot with running nested layers of virtualization (for
> system generation before the recent patches), and the result is often
> too slow to be really usable.

I guess it’s useful if you want to test a GNU/Linux system that uses the
VM service, as in:

  guix system vm my-gnu+linux.scm

where ‘my-gnu+linux.scm’ contains:

   (services (cons (service hurd-vm-service-type)
                   …))

I suppose it should just work, though probably without ‘-enable-kvm’;
janneke?

Thanks,
Ludo’.