This repository's goal is to maintain definitions that are tuned for running modern, GUI-driven guest operating systems (OS), easing their installation on hosts that leverage KVM, such as [Phyllome OS](https://phyllo.me/).
There are two kinds of definition for QEMU: session-driven virtual machines, and system-driven virtual machines. System-driven virtual machines are running with higher privileges. If one intend to share a physical device with a virtual machine using vfio passthrough, this is the definition to use. More information [here](https://blog.wikichoon.com/2016/01/qemusystem-vs-qemusession.html).
More information [here](https://wiki.phyllo.me/e/en/virt/guest) on the status for virtio support on guest operating systems.
## Context
[Libvirt](https://libvirt.org/) is the most popular virtualization library on Linux, and it is central to Phyllome OS.
Libvirt uses an XML file to store the definition of a virtual machine, including its firmware (e.g. BIOS or UEFI-based), the size of its memory, the nature of a particular device (e.g. virtio or emulated hardware), etc.
### Why
[The reference Domain XML format webpage](https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html), which is almost 100 pages long, lists most of the accepted parameters that can be used to define a virtual machine.
Picking the most optimized parameters for running a particular guest OS is a complicated task. This project intends to find the best parameters for the most popular OS.
### Assomptions
The best parameters are defined as parameters that are:
- Performance-oriented, providing good out-of-the-box performance.
- Relatively host-agnostic, so that a virtual machine could be migrated to another host.
- Modern, leveraging as many paravirtualized devices (a.k.a virtio devices) the target guest OS can support, with the intend to become usable with modern virtualization solution such as the Cloud Hypervisor.
