Manpages - qemu-ga.8

qemu-ga - QEMU Guest Agent

qemu-ga [/OPTIONS/]

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).

-m, –method=METHOD

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

-p, –path=PATH

Device/socket path (the default for virtio-serial is /dev/virtio-ports/org.qemu.guest_agent.0, the default for isa-serial is /dev/ttyS0). Socket addresses for vsock-listen are written as <cid>:<port>.

-l, –logfile=PATH

Set log file path (default is stderr).

-f, –pidfile=PATH

Specify pid file (default is /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 /etc/qemu/fsfreeze-hook). If using -F with an argument, do not follow -F with a space (for example: -F/var/run/fsfreezehook.sh).

-t, –statedir=PATH

Specify the directory to store state information (absolute paths only, default is /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, ? to list available RPCs).

-D, –dump-conf

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

-h, –help

Display this help and exit.

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.

#+begin_quote

      # 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

#+end_quote

The list of keys follows the command line options:

qemu(1)

Michael Roth <mdroth@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

2021, The QEMU Project Developers