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WSH PVE

Machine Reference

QEMU provides several machine types that emulate different hardware configurations. Two commonly used machine types are i440fx and q35.

i440fx

Section titled “i440fx”

The i440fx machine type emulates the Intel 440FX chipset, which was commonly used in PCs in the late 1990s. It provides a traditional PCI bus and is suitable for running older operating systems and software that expect this type of hardware.

  • Advantages:

    • Wide compatibility with older operating systems.
    • Stable and well-tested.

  • Disadvantages:

    • Limited support for modern hardware features.
    • May not perform as well with newer operating systems.

q35

Section titled “q35”

The q35 machine type emulates the Intel Q35 chipset, which provides a more modern hardware configuration with support for PCI Express (PCIe). This machine type is suitable for running newer operating systems and software that can take advantage of modern hardware features.

  • Advantages:

    • Better performance with newer operating systems.
    • Support for modern hardware features like PCIe.

  • Disadvantages:

    • May have compatibility issues with older operating systems.
    • Less mature and tested compared to i440fx.

PVE WSH additions

Section titled “PVE WSH additions”

In addition to i440fx and q35 (x86_64), the WSH patches expose machine types for the other architectures in the Machine selector:

  • virt — the QEMU virt machine, used for aarch64 guests.
  • sun — the Sun machine family, used for sparc (SS-5) and sparc64 (sun4u) guests.

The available machine types are filtered by the guest’s architecture; selecting a non-default architecture switches the machine list accordingly.

Further reading

Section titled “Further reading”