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Minikube and Debian

I just started looking at the Kubernetes documentation and interactive tutorial [1], which incidentally is really good. Everyone who is developing a complex system should look at this to get some ideas for online training. Here are some notes on setting it up on Debian.

Add Kubernetes Apt Repository deb https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main

First add […]

Qemu (KVM) and 9P (Virtfs) Mounts

I’ve tried setting up the Qemu (in this case KVM as it uses the Qemu code in question) 9P/Virtfs filesystem for sharing files to a VM. Here is the Qemu documentation for it [1].

VIRTFS=”-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=mapped-xattr,id=zz,writeout=immediate,fmode=0600,dmode=0700,mount_tag=zz” VIRTFS=”-virtfs local,path=/vmstore/virtfs,security_model=passthrough,id=zz,writeout=immediate,mount_tag=zz”

Above are the 2 configuration snippets I tried on the server side. The first uses mapped xattrs […]

Windows 10 on Debian under KVM

Here are some things that you need to do to get Windows 10 running on a Debian host under KVM.

UEFI Booting

UEFI is big and complex, but most of what it does isn’t needed at all. If all you want to do is boot from an image of a disk with a GPT partition […]

Debian PPC64EL Emulation

In my post on Debian S390X Emulation [1] I mentioned having problems booting a Debian PPC64EL kernel under QEMU. Giovanni commented that they had PPC64EL working and gave a link to their site with Debian QEMU images for various architectures [2]. I tried their image which worked then tried mine again which also worked – […]

Debian S390X Emulation

I decided to setup some virtual machines for different architectures. One that I decided to try was S390X – the latest 64bit version of the IBM mainframe. Here’s how to do it, I tested on a host running Debian/Unstable but Buster should work in the same way.

First you need to create a filesystem in […]

Xen CPU Use per Domain again

8 years ago I wrote a script to summarise Xen CPU use per domain [1]. Since then changes to Xen required changes to the script. I have new versions for Debian/Wheezy (Xen 4.1) and Debian/Jessie (Xen 4.4).

Here’s a new script for Debian/Wheezy:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict;

open(LIST, "xm list --long|") or die "Can't get list";

[…]

Dedicated vs Virtual Servers

A common question about hosting is whether to use a dedicated server or a virtual server.

Dedicated Servers

If you use a dedicated server then you will face the risk of problems which interrupt the boot process. It seems that all the affordable dedicated server offerings lack any good remote management, so when the server […]

Server Costs vs Virtual Server Costs

The Claim

I have seen it claimed that renting a virtual server can be cheaper than paying for electricity on a server you own. So I’m going to analyse this with electricity costs from Melbourne, Australia and the costs of running virtual servers in the US and Europe as these are the options available to […]

Xen and Debian/Squeeze

Ben Hutchings announced that the Debian kernel team are now building Xen flavoured kernels for Debian/Unstable [1]. Thanks to Max Attems and the rest of the kernel team for this and all their other great work! Thanks Ben for announcing it. The same release included OpenVZ, updated DRM, and the kernel mode part of Nouveau […]

Starting with KVM

I’ve just bought a new Thinkpad that has hardware virtualisation support and I’ve got KVM running.

HugePages

The Linux-KVM site has some information on using hugetlbfs to allow the use of 2MB pages for KVM [1]. I put “vm.nr_hugepages = 1024” in /etc/sysctl.conf to reserve 2G of RAM for KVM use. The web page notes […]