how?

janneke · on Aug 8, 2023

By reading the fine manual (<https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Virtualization-Serv...>) or blog post (<https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/childhurds-and-substitutes...>).

TL;DR; Add this

    (service hurd-vm-service-type
             (hurd-vm-configuration
              (disk-size (* 5000 (expt 2 20))) ;5G
              (memory-size 1024)))             ;1024MiB

GNU Shepherd system service description to your system configuration, and reconfigure; then just do something like

    sudo herd start childhurd
    ssh -p 10022 root@localhost

If you're not using Guix System, you can still download a prebuilt QEMU image from <https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/latest/>:

    wget -O hurd-latest.img https://ci.guix.gnu.org/search/latest/image?query=spec:images+status:success+system:x86_64-linux+hurd-barebones.qcow2

and do something like:

    qemu-system-i386 -m 2048 --enable-kvm --hda hurd-latest.img

Enjoy!