Alex ph1048

How to mount a qcow2 disk image

This is a quick guide to mounting a qcow2 disk images on your host server. This is useful to reset passwords, edit files, or recover something without the virtual machine running.

Step 1 - Enable NBD on the Host

modprobe nbd max_part=8

Introduction

This is my guide for a successful PCI-Passthrough from Linux (Arch Linux) to QEMU/KVM via virt-manager and libvirtd into a Windows 10 Home guest.

NOTE: This is a guide for Intel only. I do not own an AMD machine, and will not add AMD information this guide until such time that I do, which could be never.

Hardware

Device Type	Device
CPU	Intel Core i7 7700K Quad-Core, Hyperthreading
Motherboard	Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 5

VFIO Setup Guide

I play games regularly, and the sad reality is that it forces me to use Windows on my desktop. There's a Linux installation on there, but rebooting into it is such a massive interruption that I usually just move over to my laptop for programming. Working on a laptop leads to all sorts of ergonomic issues, and it felt like a massive waste to not develop on the desktop hardware I invested so much in. So after extensively researching what the VFIO community has been doing, I've deleted my Windows installation and moved all my gaming into a virtual machine on a Linux host.

Normally VMs are too slow for gaming, but thanks to a feature called VFIO you can run games at near-native performance by passing graphics cards and USB controllers directly to a virtual machine. The only requirement is that your board supports IOMMU, which most modern systems have. In this guide I'll wal