QEMU Docker Machine Driver Plugin (Windows only Twingsister fork)

This Docker Machine driver for QEMU enables the use of the QEMU hypervisor with Docker-Machine in Windows WITHOUT admin privileges and WITHOUT bios enabled virtualization.

See this webinar (link) for the installation instructions involving this driver. This is part of a project whose aim is to run Docker in QEMU from a USB pen WITHOUT admin privileges and WITHOUT bios enabled virtualization. Part of this project is an extended version of docker-machine that enables the control of some communication timeouts. Find this extended version of docker-machine (here). The two programs works in cooperation so, please, take a look to this fork of docker-machine, too.

This driver also introduces options --qemu-attempts, --qemu-sleep, --qemu-tick for timeout control (see below for defaults).

When this driver communicates with the QEMU VM, the QEMU hypervisor, running without Hw virtualization support, could fail to communicate in the due timeout. You can use these parameters to prevent the driver to fail due to timeouts. Indeed, during driver to hypervisor communication these parameters are used this way. The driver retries the communication for --qemu-attempts doing nothing between attempts for --qemu-sleep seconds. Furthermore, at each failed attempt, the tolerated timeout is increased of --qemu-tick seconds.

Requirements

• A USB 3.0+ pen
• Windows 10 64 Bit
• QEMU 2.9.0+

Install from Binary

Please see the link

Build driver from Source

go get -v github.com/TWINGSISTER/docker-machine-driver-qemu
cd <GO-ROOT>/src/github.com/intel-iot-devkit/docker-machine-driver-qemu
SET GOOS=windows 
go build -i -o docker-machine-driver-qemu.exe ./bin

Setting GOOS=linux and GOARCH=386 or other architectures you can cross compile and generate binaries for your system.

Usage

The usual Docker Machine commands apply:

docker-machine create --driver qemu qemumachine
docker-machine env qemumachine

On Windows QEMU_LOCATION must be set to the location where the QEMU exe is e.g. --qemu-location "Z:\PortableApps\PortableDockerLight64\QEmu64"

Limitations

• Ports: QEMU will not generally respect forwarding the network traffic to the docker-machine. During creation, you need to explicitly state the port ranges you wish to use For example: --qemu-open-ports 8022,1111,1231-1235
• Mounts: Using mounts into containers is not supported.
• Concurrent usage: One instance of a machine using QEMU driver is possible at this time. The provisioner does not handle NATd Docker Ports.

CLI Options/Environment variables and defaults:

CLI option	Environment variable	Default
--qemu-vcpu-count	QEMU_CPU_COUNT	2
--qemu-memory-size	QEMU_MEMORY_SIZE	1024
--qemu-disk-size	QEMU_DISK_SIZE	18000 Grows with qcow2 to this limit
--qemu-boot2docker-url	QEMU_BOOT2DOCKER_URL	boot2docker URL
--qemu-open-ports	-	-
--qemu-attempts		60
--qemu-sleep		1
--qemu-tick		1