QEMU/KVM on ThinkPad X230T Laptop with Dual-boot

Vir­tu­al Ma­chines

I was in need to ac­cess Win­dows 10 from Kali Lin­ux on my dual boot­ed Leno­vo ThinkPad X230T laptop/​​​tablet de­vice. Ac­tu­al­ly I will pass­through one of the phys­i­cal stor­age de­vices where Win­dows 10 is al­ready in­stalled. So here are the things I've done to achieve that.

Test the Vir­tu­al­iza­tion Ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the Sys­tem

Check weath­er the sys­tem sup­ports vir­tu­al­iza­tion and it is en­abled via the BIOS. The fol­low­ing com­mand must re­turn at least 1:

egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

In­stall QE­MU, KVM, LIB­VIRT

With­in the old­er ver­sions of De­bian based OS, like as Ubun­tu 20.04, we was in need to in­stall the pack­ages qe­mu qe­mu-kvm, but in mot re­cent op­er­at­ing sys­tems as Kali 2022 we need to in­stall qe­mu-sys­tem-x86 in­stead.

sudo apt install qemu-system-x86 libvirt-daemon bridge-utils
sudo apt install libvirt-clients virtinst libosinfo-bin ovmf
sudo apt install virt-manager virt-viewer remmina # For desktop user

In or­der to get rid of the pass­word di­a­logue for virt-man­ag­er – "Sys­tem pol­i­cy pre­vents man­age­ment of lo­cal vir­tu­al­iza­tion sys­tems" – I've added my Lin­ux user to the lib­virt group.

sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER
sudo usermod -aG kvm $USER
grep "$USER" /etc/group

Set­up the Vir­tu­al Ma­chine

With­in my cur­rent set­up the vir­tu­al ma­chine will use a phys­i­cal SSD dri­ve, where Win­dows 10 is pre­vi­ous­ly in­stalled and ful­ly op­er­a­tional via the dual boot op­tion and I want to keep this way of ac­cess­ing Win­dows 10 too.

The first "spe­cial" thing ac­cord­ing to my set­up is that both op­er­at­ing sys­tems are in­stalled in UE­FI mode, so the vir­tu­al ma­chine should have UE­FI firmware and with chipset Q35.

Iden­ti­fy the SSD

There are two ways to pass the SSD as block de­vice as it is de­scribed in this sec­tion and by pass­ing the SA­TA con­troller as it is de­scribed in the ar­ti­cle QEMU/KVM on AMD Ryzen 9 Desk­top with Dual-boot and Passthrough.

At first glance there is not any sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance dif­fer­ence. How­ev­er when you use the block de­vice ap­proach you can use the write cache op­tion for the de­vice, which will in­crease the speed of han­dling of the large files. On the oth­er hand, when pass­ing the SA­TA con­troller ap­proach is in use, Win­dows 10 will use the same dri­ver with­in the VM en­vi­ron­ment and with­in the na­tive boot. In both cas­es the SSD shouldn't be mount­ed at the host's side.

The set­up of the vir­tu­al ma­chine is done via the virt-man­ag­er GUI. The first "spe­cial" thing ac­cord­ing to my set­up is that both op­er­at­ing sys­tems are in­stalled in UE­FI mode, so the vir­tu­al ma­chine should be UE­FI with chipset Q35.

In or­der to pass-through the phys­i­cal SSD/HDD in this con­text, you need to iden­ti­fy by us­ing the com­mands ls­blk and ls ‑l /de­v/disk/­by-id/ or some oth­er suit­able you way.

Then ed­it the XML con­fig­u­ra­tion of the vir­tu­al ma­chine as it is shown be­low. By de­fault the XML is not ed­itable, you can en­able edit­ing via Ed­it > Pref­er­ences from the main Man­ag­er win­dow – ref­er­ence .

<disk type="block" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="raw" cache="none" discard="unmap"/>
  <source dev="/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ADATA_SU800_2I0220056120"/>
  <target dev="sda" bus="sata"/>
  <address type="drive" controller="0" bus="0" target="0" unit="0"/>
</disk>

Note you don't need to type the 5th line if your us­ing virt-man­ag­er to ed­it the XML en­try for the dri­ve – it will be gen­er­at­ed au­to­mat­i­cal­ly on save.

In most how-to man­u­als they pro­pose to use <tar­get dev="vdX" bus="virtio"/>, but it is not pos­si­ble to use vir­tio while there is not dri­ver in­stalled with­in the Win­dows 10 OS. So you need to in­stall the dri­ver first… or dur­ing the in­stal­la­tion of Win­dows if it is a new in­stal­la­tion.

In­stall the Guest Tools

Once the guest OS is run­ning suc­cess­ful­ly, the fi­nal step of the set­up is in­stalling the QEMU/KVM Guest tools for Win­dows, thus the screen will be au­to­mat­i­cal­ly re­sized with­in the SPICE client of virt-man­ag­er.

The fi­nal con­fig­u­ra­tion of the VM

virsh --connect qemu:///system dumpxml "Win10.SSD.PT" | tee "Win10.SSD.PT.xml"

<domain type='kvm'>
  <name>Win10.SSD.PT</name>
  <uuid>f45cd48b-449a-460c-bbfe-fdf06052f30e</uuid>
  <title>Windows 10, Physical Disk Passthrough, Q35/UEFI</title>
  <description>https://wiki.metalevel.tech/wiki/QEMU/KVM_on_Kali_Linux_2022_at_ThinkPad_X230T</description>
  <metadata>
    <libosinfo:libosinfo xmlns:libosinfo="http://libosinfo.org/xmlns/libvirt/domain/1.0">
      <libosinfo:os id="http://microsoft.com/win/10"/>
    </libosinfo:libosinfo>
  </metadata>
  <memory unit='KiB'>3145728</memory>
  <currentMemory unit='KiB'>3145728</currentMemory>
  <memoryBacking>
    <source type='memfd'/>
    <access mode='shared'/>
  </memoryBacking>
  <vcpu placement='static'>2</vcpu>
  <os>
    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-q35-7.0'>hvm</type>
    <loader readonly='yes' type='pflash'>/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.ms.fd</loader>
    <nvram>/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/win10_VARS.fd</nvram>
    <boot dev='hd'/>
    <bootmenu enable='yes'/>
  </os>
  <features>
    <acpi/>
    <apic/>
    <hyperv mode='custom'>
      <relaxed state='on'/>
      <vapic state='on'/>
      <spinlocks state='on' retries='8191'/>
    </hyperv>
    <vmport state='off'/>
  </features>
  <cpu mode='host-passthrough' check='none' migratable='on'>
    <topology sockets='1' dies='1' cores='2' threads='1'/>
  </cpu>
  <clock offset='localtime'>
    <timer name='rtc' tickpolicy='catchup'/>
    <timer name='pit' tickpolicy='delay'/>
    <timer name='hpet' present='no'/>
    <timer name='hypervclock' present='yes'/>
  </clock>
  <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
  <on_crash>destroy</on_crash>
  <pm>
    <suspend-to-mem enabled='no'/>
    <suspend-to-disk enabled='no'/>
  </pm>
  <devices>
    <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator>
    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none' discard='unmap'/>
      <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ADATA_SU800_2I0220056120'/>
      <target dev='sda' bus='sata'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>
    <controller type='usb' index='0' model='qemu-xhci' ports='15'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x02' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='0' model='pcie-root'/>
    <controller type='pci' index='1' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='1' port='0x10'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0' multifunction='on'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='2' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='2' port='0x11'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x1'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='3' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='3' port='0x12'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x2'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='4' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='4' port='0x13'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x3'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='5' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='5' port='0x14'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x4'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='6' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='6' port='0x15'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x5'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='7' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='7' port='0x16'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x6'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='8' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='8' port='0x17'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x7'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='9' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='9' port='0x18'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0' multifunction='on'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='10' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='10' port='0x19'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x1'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='11' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='11' port='0x1a'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x2'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='12' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='12' port='0x1b'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x3'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='13' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='13' port='0x1c'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x4'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='pci' index='14' model='pcie-root-port'>
      <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
      <target chassis='14' port='0x1d'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x5'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='sata' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x1f' function='0x2'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x03' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </controller>
    <interface type='network'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:e0:6e:b1'/>
      <source network='default'/>
      <model type='e1000e'/>
      <link state='up'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </interface>
    <serial type='pty'>
      <target type='isa-serial' port='0'>
        <model name='isa-serial'/>
      </target>
    </serial>
    <console type='pty'>
      <target type='serial' port='0'/>
    </console>
    <channel type='spicevmc'>
      <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </channel>
    <input type='tablet' bus='usb'>
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </input>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <input type='keyboard' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='spice' autoport='yes'>
      <listen type='address'/>
      <image compression='off'/>
    </graphics>
    <sound model='ich9'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x1b' function='0x0'/>
    </sound>
    <audio id='1' type='spice'/>
    <video>
      <model type='qxl' ram='65536' vram='65536' vgamem='16384' heads='1' primary='yes'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x0'/>
    </video>
    <redirdev bus='usb' type='spicevmc'>
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='2'/>
    </redirdev>
    <redirdev bus='usb' type='spicevmc'>
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='3'/>
    </redirdev>
    <memballoon model='virtio'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x04' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </memballoon>
  </devices>
</domain>

Ref­er­ences

• QEMU/KVM and GPU Passthrough in De­tails
• QEMU/KVM on AMD Ryzen 9 Desk­top with Dual-boot and Passthrough
• Ubun­tu Wi­ki: KVM Man­ag­ing
• Ask Ubun­tu: Add phys­i­cal disk to KVM vir­tu­al ma­chine
• Ask Fe­do­ra: Why does virt-man­ag­er ask for au­then­ti­ca­tion pass­word?
• Ronaldevers​.nl: Adding a Phys­i­cal Disk to a Guest with Lib­virt / KVM
• Charleslabri​.com: Adding Passthrough Phys­i­cal Disk in KVM Guests
• Serv­er Fault: I don't see the run­ning guest in virsh
• Unix and Lin­ux: How to list do­mains in virsh?

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