The Plasma guests were made for an Apple silicon Mac only: the flake fixed the
guest to aarch64-linux and the host of QEMU to the Mac. `mkPlasmaGuest` now
takes the system of the guest and the packages of the machine that runs QEMU,
and the flake has the two QEMU guests for a Linux machine with KVM as well:
plasma-vm-x86_64 and plasma-vm-session-x86_64, and the same pair for aarch64
(plasma-vm-aarch64, plasma-vm-session-aarch64). The three guests of a Mac keep
their names and are built from the same instructions.
An x86_64 machine has a VGA that QEMU adds unless it is told not to, which would
be a second display next to the virtio-gpu that KWin draws on. An x86_64 guest
therefore gets virtio-vga, a virtio-gpu that is also the VGA, and `-vga none`;
an aarch64 guest has no VGA and keeps virtio-gpu-pci.
plasma-guests-eval evaluates every guest and asserts what each is for: the
architecture of the guest, the system of its host, KVM or HVF, and one display
device. docs/dev/utm.md says which guest is for which host and how to build and
run one on a Linux machine; the README and CONTRIBUTING say that there are
guests for both.
The VM tests boot a machine, run a scenario and power it off. Trying a change by
hand needs a Plasma session that stays up, and on a Mac, one that renders on its
GPU.
nix/dev/plasma-vm.nix is a guest for QEMU on an Apple silicon Mac, headless or
with a Plasma session that logs in by itself, and nix/dev/plasma-utm.nix is that
session as a disk image for UTM, whose QEMU renders on the Mac's GPU. They are
nixosConfigurations of the flake, and install komorebi with services.komorebi
from the flake's packages. They carry no key, password or configuration of
anyone's: the console logs in by itself, ssh takes the keys a user puts in the
guest, and the RDP password is a file in the guest. plasma-guests-eval evaluates
the three on every system.
nix/dev/krdp.nix runs KRDP in the session, and the slow suite vm-rdp runs the
same unit in the session node: it waits for a password and listens once it has
one, FreeRDP's client is let in with the password and not with another, and the
picture the client gets on an X server of its own is the display. FreeRDP
decodes KRDP's H.264 with OpenH264 and shows nothing, so the guests' client is
built without it and decodes with FFmpeg. Keys over RDP stay unverified, since
no client can script them against KRDP; PLATFORM.md says so and what the suite
checks.
docs/dev/utm.md says how to build and run the guests, and what a builder has to
be.