Support Qemu accelerated podman machine on Windows hosts

[arixmkii]

/kind feature

Description

Support Qemu accelerated podman machine on Windows hosts.

• gvproxy supports windows in its latest releases https://github.com/containers/gvisor-tap-vsock/releases/tag/v0.3.0
• There are Qemu windows builds, which supports Hyper-V based acceleration https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/ so, -machine q35,accel=whpx:tcg should perform snappy on Hyper-V enabled hosts.

I'm pretty new to podman machine, so, I might be not aware of other external components needed to run podman machine.

I saw that there is support for running podman machine in WSL2 being merged to 4.0.0 RC2. Why this idea still makes sense.

• It will be Fedora CoreOS based;
• It will be fully featured Linux VM;
• It will more precisely match behavior of the podman machine on MacOS;
• It will allow running at least some arm64 images with qemu syscalls for guest architecture on windows hosts.

The downside from WSL2 option would be less efficient host resource management, but in some cases it is not of the concern.

What is missing right now is the command line support for choosing between multiple available vendors for podman machine on a single platform, which I don't think is a thing already (at least from my studying of the source tree).

[rhatdan]

I am fine with this, but we need community to work on it. If you want to implement this and it is simply a CLI change, I would be all for it.

[afbjorklund]

@arixmkii

The main problem was the lack of unix sockets, for the Windows build. Then there were a lot of other "little things", to fix.

Here some old code, if you want to continue with it, https://github.com/afbjorklund/podman/commits/machine-windows

Things like missing "xzcat.exe" and missing $HOME, and so on and so forth.

The official Podman support would be for WSL2, so it (Windows) was abandoned.

• Introduce Windows WSL implementation of podman machine #12503

Like you say, qemu itself should support windows and co-exist with Hyper-V.

[arixmkii]

@afbjorklund Thank you for your input! I have interest to at least try to make it work, but I need to study the code in more details, it will take time.

The official Podman support would be for WSL2

Feel free to close this issue then with this resolution, it could be reopened/recreated later if there is some actual work to base it on.

[afbjorklund]

There was windows support in podman-machine (v1) but it mostly used VirtualBox so the QEMU driver was bare-bones...

It should be possible to use "fifo files" instead of "unix sockets", but it will take some adaption of the go code and qemu flags.

[albertdb]

This would be really nice to have. Currently the only alternative, where WSL2 is not feasible, is using Minikube, which at the current version includes Podman v2.

[afbjorklund]

You could also DIY, using something like Vagrant for the provisioning. But otherwise I think "everyone" is using WSL2 now.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/about/supported-guest-os

[arixmkii]

The main problem was the lack of unix sockets

Go has built in support for unix sockets on windows https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/125456/ which I expect could work just fine for gvproxy and podman binaries.

Mingw added afunix.h last summer (pretty fresh and probably will need to build it from sources to get it into toolchain) https://github.com/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/blob/43e87a27fdb97ae562f7c1e2017c8ce58fef9ee1/mingw-w64-headers/include/afunix.h I believe then Qemu sources could be patched to allow unix sockets in windows build at least behind conditional switch.

Windows support lacks DATAGRAM for unix sockets, but I'm not ready to say if this will be a blocker or not.

missing "xzcat.exe"

Download latest windows build of xzutils https://tukaani.org/xz/ and copy or remane xz.exe to xzcat.exe and it will behave as xzcat, because it checks the command line first argument to choose the behavior. More natural with symlinks, but this way it will work on windows - checked SHA256 of processed qcow2.xz on Win and MacOS hosts.

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