Provisioning with qemu and libvirt

First, use the bootc-image-builder project to make a .raw or .qcow2 disk image from your container image.

The default base image does not have any default credentials. If you have not configured any, you will not be able to log into the virtual machine. See Authentication as well as Building containers for more information.

Example bootc-image-builder invocation

podman run \
    --rm \
    -it \
    --privileged \
    --pull=newer \
    --security-opt label=type:unconfined_t \
    -v $(pwd)/output:/output \
    quay.io/centos-bootc/bootc-image-builder:latest \
    --type qcow2 \
    <your container image here>

(Note that there are more options, such as including a config.json which can inject users and SSH keys)

libvirt

The libvirt project is supported on several platforms but is very common on Linux environments.

Here is a very simplified example virt-install invocation:

virt-install \
    --name fedora-bootc \
    --cpu host \
    --vcpus 4 \
    --memory 4096 \
    --import --disk ./output/qcow2/disk.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
    --os-variant fedora-eln

More information about virt-install is available in its man page, as well as other places such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation.

qemu

Using "raw" qemu in some cases gives more control than higher level tools such as libvirt, but introduces architecture and platform specifics.

qemu-system-x86_64 (Linux)

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -M accel=kvm \
    -cpu host \
    -smp 2 \
    -m 4096 \
    -bios /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd \
    -serial stdio \
    -snapshot output/qcow2/disk.qcow2

qemu (MacOS, ARM/aarch64)

qemu-system-aarch64 \
    -M accel=hvf \
    -cpu host \
    -smp 2 \
    -m 4096 \
    -bios /opt/homebrew/Cellar/qemu/8.1.3_2/share/qemu/edk2-aarch64-code.fd \
    -serial stdio \
    -machine virt \
    -snapshot output/qcow2/disk.qcow2

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