Post B1colClvDiYwhAx5CS by CliftonR@wandering.shop
 (DIR) More posts by CliftonR@wandering.shop
 (DIR) Post #B1codmzqecNWj9vi2i by CliftonR@wandering.shop
       2025-12-26T00:26:42Z
       
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       Question for my Linuxheads  (1 of N):For VMs on Linux, if I want to use an existing physical drive with OS installed and run it as a guest VM, like I used to be able to do in VMWare years ago, how do I go about doing this?When I look at virtmanager, for example, it seems to assume that I'm creating all VM drive images as files within an existing efs partition. At least currently, on the way towards fully switching over, I want to try booting my existing Windows drive as the guest OS. +
       
 (DIR) Post #B1codoXCw4enUuXrg8 by grumpybozo@toad.social
       2025-12-26T00:42:31Z
       
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       @CliftonR I don’t actually do this anywhere but I do deal with qemu/KVM/libvirt  a lot (via OpenNebula) which I understand to also be the backend for virtmanager. The functionality you are looking for is referred to as “device passthrough”  in the documentation I’ve seen.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1codpiaXFM3AUsT3Y by CliftonR@wandering.shop
       2025-12-26T00:52:26Z
       
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       @grumpybozo Thank you! That gives me a much better idea what magic phrase to look for.And yes, KVM/libvirt and qemu are definitely what's behind virtmanager or it seems nearly anything VM-ish on Linux.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1codqfmz8i486ZkKe by cks@mastodon.social
       2025-12-26T01:22:56Z
       
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       @CliftonR @grumpybozo It looks like there's a whole morass of various sorts of passthrough, but sadly it looks like there's nothing where you can easily say 'here is /dev/sdb, give it to the virtual machine'. (At least not in virt-manager, it may be possible with bare QEMU command lines if you want to wrangle them.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B1cods4zkuSyUZNOG8 by CliftonR@wandering.shop
       2025-12-26T00:31:00Z
       
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       At this stage, I don't know enough to know whether* I'm using the right tool but not finding the right options, or* I'm using the wrong tool for the job, or * there are specific technical reasons I'm taking the wrong approach, or* I'm asking the wrong questions, or* whether the Linux answer is "you shouldn't be doing that entirely because it's Bad and Icky."(Hopefully the community has grown beyond the last answer but you never know.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B1colClvDiYwhAx5CS by CliftonR@wandering.shop
       2025-12-26T01:32:40Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @lanodan @cks @grumpybozo THANK YOU! That's perfect, and enough to get me started. I can figure out the rest as I go.