qemu-ga (8) - Linux Manuals

qemu-ga: QEMU Guest Agent

Command to display qemu-ga manual in Linux: $ man 8 qemu-ga

NAME

qemu-ga - QEMU Guest Agent

SYNOPSIS

qemu-ga [OPTIONS]

DESCRIPTION

The QEMU Guest Agent is a daemon intended to be run within virtual machines. It allows the hypervisor host to perform various operations in the guest, such as:

•: get information from the guest
•: set the guest's system time
•: read/write a file
•: sync and freeze the filesystems
•: suspend the guest
•: reconfigure guest local processors
•: set user's password
•: ...

qemu-ga will read a system configuration file on startup (located at /etc/qemu/qemu-ga.conf by default), then parse remaining configuration options on the command line. For the same key, the last option wins, but the lists accumulate (see below for configuration file format).

OPTIONS

-m, --method=method

  Transport method: one of B<unix-listen>, B<virtio-serial>, or
  B<isa-serial> (B<virtio-serial> is the default).

-p, --path=path

  Device/socket path (the default for virtio-serial is
  B</dev/virtio-ports/org.qemu.guest_agent.0>,
  the default for isa-serial is B</dev/ttyS0>)

-l, --logfile=path

  Set log file path (default is stderr).

-f, --pidfile=path

  Specify pid file (default is B</var/run/qemu-ga.pid>).

-F, --fsfreeze-hook=path

  Enable fsfreeze hook. Accepts an optional argument that specifies
  script to run on freeze/thaw. Script will be called with
  'freeze'/'thaw' arguments accordingly (default is
  B</etc/qemu/fsfreeze-hook>). If using -F with an argument, do
  not follow -F with a space (for example:
  B<-F/var/run/fsfreezehook.sh>).

-t, --statedir=path

  Specify the directory to store state information (absolute paths only,
  default is B</var/run>).

-v, --verbose

  Log extra debugging information.

-V, --version

  Print version information and exit.

-d, --daemon

  Daemonize after startup (detach from terminal).

-b, --blacklist=list

  Comma-separated list of RPCs to disable (no spaces, B<?> to list
  available RPCs).

-D, --dump-conf

  Dump the configuration in a format compatible with F<qemu-ga.conf>
  and exit.

-h, --help

  Display this help and exit.

FILES

The syntax of the qemu-ga.conf configuration file follows the Desktop Entry Specification, here is a quick summary: it consists of groups of key-value pairs, interspersed with comments.

        # qemu-ga configuration sample
        [general]
        daemonize = 0
        pidfile = /var/run/qemu-ga.pid
        verbose = 0
        method = virtio-serial
        path = /dev/virtio-ports/org.qemu.guest_agent.0
        statedir = /var/run

The list of keys follows the command line options:

daemon= boolean
method= string
path= string
logfile= string
pidfile= string
fsfreeze-hook= string
statedir= string
verbose= boolean
blacklist= string list

AUTHOR

Michael Roth <mdroth [at] linux.vnet.ibm.com>