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#1 2019-11-08 06:40:45

everwisher
Member
Registered: 2019-09-11
Posts: 33

Is it possible to run Arch as a headless host?

I'm currently running Arch with lxde DE & virt-manager on the host machine for a few Windows virtual machines. As I'm planning to run a macOS Catalina as another guest, it is advised to passthrough the iGPU to macOS guest for fully accelerated 3D because I don't have a discrete graphics card for now.

I wonder if I can directly boot into a guest OS headlessly on machine startup? And how do I get graphics back to Arch if something goes wrong under the hood?

ps: I'm using a Coffee-Lake-based CPU whose iGPU doesn't work with Intel gvt-g.

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#2 2019-11-08 19:05:30

WSDMatty
Member
Registered: 2019-08-27
Posts: 22

Re: Is it possible to run Arch as a headless host?

I do not know virt-manager at all, so I can't give any answers on that. I would say, Look through the documentation for it and determine how to start VMs on startup.

I can tell you, this is possible with virtualbox. This page explains how to set up a headless VM under virtualbox, and this page here explains how to start a VM during system boot. It's not an exact fit for Arch, since arch uses systemd and not init, But it's a place to start.

tl;dr: It is possible, but you're going to have to do some research.

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#3 2019-11-09 12:48:43

koffeinfriedhof
Member
Registered: 2017-11-30
Posts: 89

Re: Is it possible to run Arch as a headless host?

You can connect via ssh to the arch server and use virsh start VM_NAME or mark it as autostart in virt-manager. Depending on the machine-setup there is vnc  accessible using ports 590X (where X is depending on how much guests you are running), a display running on a tty or at least the virsh console VM_NAME command.

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