26 January 2022

This document is a summary of how to set up KVM and QEMU to run virtual machines on a system running a recent version of Ubuntu (and its variants). For other Linux distributions, you will need to search for articles and videos related to your specific distro. Although the requirements are substantially the same, package names and exact procedures will vary.

An Intel-type i386 or amd64 architecture is assumed.

Preparation

Verify 64-bit processor (recommended):

egrep -c ' lm ' /proc/cpuinfo

Verify 64-bit kernel (recommended):

uname -m

Verify virtualization support (required):

egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If you are using a modern machine but virtualization support is not present, you will probably be able to enable it in the BIOS settings.

Installation

sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virt-manager

(Note: Many sources list additional packages, but in Ubuntu 20.04 I found those to be dependencies that were automatically installed by the above.)

Set Permissions