qemu No serial console in VM images?

[mwisnicki]

Am I doing something wrong or VM images don't come with serial console enabled?

set -e
wget https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/14.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2.xz
xz -d FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2.xz
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp 2 -m 4G \
  -drive file=FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2,if=virtio \
  -nographic

I see no output. Replacing -nographic with -display curses works well enough so I can enable serial console myself:

echo '-S115200 -Dh' > /boot.config
cat <<EOT >> /boot/loader.conf
boot_multicons="YES"
boot_serial="YES"
console=comconsole
EOT

But why wouldn't this be a default in images built specifically for running in VMs which are very often headless???

 

[levitating]

I am also wondering why this isn't the default for vms.

 

[Jim B.]

One reason might be that people who use a lot of VMs tend to use tools like vnc, spice, or virt-manager to access the VM, not a serial port. Unfortunately, FreeBSD does not yet support the spice-vdagent which gives copy/paste and file transfer between host and guest. Virt-manager requires a compatible hypervisor. VNC (tightvnc) works though.

 

[Phishfry]

VM images don't come with serial console enabled?

Do you have very long serial cable to reach the datacenter?

Seriously though. Cloud providers usually provide a console from the web control panel.
See virsh for setting up your image and sneaking back in when you forget your credentials.

 

[Phishfry]

Generally VM images were for cloud deployment in my mind. vhd, vmdk images and the such.

It seems there is a change in -CURRENT VM images with CLOUDINIT images.

Index of /snapshots/VM-IMAGES/15.0-CURRENT/amd64/Latest/

To my recollection the only images with serial console enabled are aarch64, armv7 and other sd-card images