Posts for the month of December 2014

Intel HD Audio support for AQEMU (and other bugs)

AQEMU is basic Qt-based GUI frontend for creating, modifying, and launching VMs. Unfortunately, the last release was years ago, and QEMU and KVM have progressed in that time. There are a few bugs that bother me about AQEMU. Today, I addressed some of them.

Edit: This blog post has been reworked after I found upstream patches.

The simple one was a spelling fix; the word "Advanced" was misspelled as "Advaced" in multiple places. Someone else posted a patch for the same problem, but that missed one occurrence of the typo.

The more important one was adding a check-box for the Intel HD Audio sound card. But then I found someone else had already posted a patch to add sound hardware support for both that card and the CS4231A soundcard. That patch did not apply cleanly to the aqemu-0.8.2-10 version as shipped in Fedora 20, so I backported that patch. However, this patch was incomplete; it was missing the code for saving those options to the configuration file for the VM. So I created a patch to save those options which can be applied on top of my backport. At this point, I would suggest using the backport and the bugfix, rather than my original patch.

After applying the sound card support patches, you will need to re-detect your emulators so that AQEMU will allow you to select the newly-supported cards. To do that, go to File->Advanced Settings and click on Find All Emulators and then OK. Close and reopen AQEMU and the new audio card options should be available.

And one more was a fix for the "Use video streams detection and compression" option. When reading the VM's configuration file, the 'Use_Video_Stream_Compression' flag was incorrectly parsed due to a misplaced exclamation point, leading to that option getting disabled every time you modified the VM configuration. (Reported upstream.)