Re: [v2 1/1] doc: Show how to boot result of 'vm-image'.

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 11:08:09AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
> 
> > * doc/guix.texi (Running GuixSD in a VM): New node.
> > (Invoking guix system): Add reference to 'Running GuixSD in a VM'.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > +@node Running GuixSD in a VM
> > +@subsection Running GuixSD in a VM
> 
> s/VM/virtual machine/ on the second line.
> 
> > +One way to run GuixSD in a virtual machine is to build a GuixSD virtual
> 
> After “virtual machine”, add “(VM)” to introduce the acronym.
> 
> > +machine image using @command{guix system vm-image} (@pxref{Invoking guix
> > +system}). The returned image is in qcow2 format, which the
>            ^^
> Please make sure that all the end-of-sentence periods are followed by
> two spaces or a newline (info "(texinfo) Not Ending a Sentence").
> 
> > +$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
> > +-net user -net nic,model=virtio \
> > +-enable-kvm -m 256 /tmp/qemu-image
> 
> Would be nice to align the 2nd and 3rd line below the ‘e’ of ‘qemu’.
> 
> > +And the annotated version:
> 
> Maybe “Here is what each of these options means:”.
> 
> > +x86_64, you can get a list of available NIC models by running
> > +`qemu-system-x86_64 -net nic,model=help`.
> 
> Instead of backquotes, use @command{…}.
> 
> > +@item -enable-kvm
> > +If your system has hardware virtualization extensions, enabling the
> > +kernel virtual machine will make things run faster.
> 
> s/kernel virtual machine/Linux kernel's virtual machine support (KVM)/
> 
> > +@item -m 256
> > +RAM available to the guest OS, in megabytes. Defaults to 128 megabytes,
> > +which is not enough for the Guix daemon.
> 
> “Defaults to 128@tie{}MiB, which may be insufficient for some
> operations.”  (It’s not the daemon specifically, it’s mostly if you want
> to run X + Xfce, for instance.  The former ‘guix substitute’ used to
> take quite a lot of memory, but I think that’s no longer the case since
> we switched to HTTP pipelining.)

I hit this limit while using the "bare-bones" configuration template.
The system would boot with 128 MiB of RAM but any operations using the
daemon would fail.

Also, I looked into how QEMU interprets "megabyte" et al. From the QEMU
source file "include/qemu-common.h":
#define M_BYTE     (1ULL << 20)

So, I replaced "megabyte" with "mebibyte" in this paragraph.

> 
> > +@item /tmp/qemu-image
> > +The filesystem path of the qcow2 image.
> 
> s/filesystem path/file name/
> 
> OK with these changes, thanks a lot!

Thanks for your help!

> 
> Ludo’.