QEMU/KVM on ThinkPad X230T Laptop with Dual-boot

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Vir­tu­al Ma­chines

I was in need to ac­cess Win­dows 10 from Kali Lin­ux on my dual boot­ed Leno­vo ThinkPad X230T de­vice. 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 libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager virtinst libosinfo-bin ovmf remmina

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

Set­up the vir­tu­al ma­chine

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 too. In or­der to pass-through the phys­i­cal SSD/HDD you need to do set­up ad fol­low. 

<disk type="block" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="raw" cache="none" discard="unmap"/>
  <source dev="/dev/sda"/>
  <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 new in­stal­la­tion.

In­stall the guest tools

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

Ref­er­ences

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