QEMU guest agent

The QEMU guest agent is a daemon that runs inside virtual machines and provides a way to perform various operations from the host system, like receiving IP addresses and hostname, executing commands inside the guest, taking screenshots, etc.

The QEMU guest agent facilitates better coordination between the host and guest systems. It enables better integration for management tasks, improves performance, and allows for enhanced features like automatic IP address configuration and live snapshotting.

The QEMU guest agent communication is typically done over a virtio-serial channel, which allows bidirectional communication between the guest and its host system. The virtio-serial channel can be accessed through a serial or a named pipe.

The QEMU guest agent provides a rich set of functionality, including retrieving and changing guest hostname, querying and changing network configurations, executing commands inside the guest, taking screenshots, creating and managing virtual machine snapshots, retrieving guest information like CPU utilization or memory usage, and more.

The QEMU guest agent is designed to work with various operating systems commonly used as virtual machine guests, including Linux (multiple distributions), Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Solaris.

The installation method for the QEMU guest agent depends on the specific operating system used as the guest. Generally, it involves installing the appropriate package or driver inside the guest operating system. Detailed installation instructions can be found in the official documentation for the specific guest operating system being used.

Yes, the QEMU guest agent is part of the open-source QEMU project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which means it can be freely used, modified, and distributed.

Yes, although initially developed for use with QEMU/KVM, the QEMU guest agent has been adopted by other virtualization platforms and hypervisors like VMware, VirtualBox, and Microsoft Hyper-V. It provides similar functionality across these platforms, enabling better integration and management capabilities.

The QEMU guest agent communicates through a secure channel between the host system and the guest. The communication channel can be encrypted using various mechanisms like SSH or TLS to protect against unauthorized access and ensure data confidentiality and integrity.

Official documentation for the QEMU guest agent can be found on the Red Hat Customer Portal website or on the official QEMU project website. These resources provide detailed information on installation, usage, configuration, and troubleshooting.