Virtual Machine in Arch Linux

Why?

I moved fully to Linux (Arch BTW), and sometimes I need to use Windows for work (like opening RDP files).

Check virtualization is enabled

Check if you can virtualization- work on any CPU:

egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

• If the output > 0 we OK.
• If the output = 0 we need to enable virtualization.

Tech stack

• QEMU: The emulator.
• libvirt-daemon: runs virtualization in the background.
• bridge-utils: impotent networking dependencies.
• Virt-Manager: GUI to manage all the above.

Installation

First. sync the package manager:

sudo packman -Syy

Install packages:

sudo pacman -S qemu virt-manager virt-viewer dnsmasq vde2 bridge-utils openbsd-netcat ebtables iptables libguestfs swtpm --noconfirm

Enable services:

sudo systemctl enable --now libvirtd 

Give permissions to your user to run libvirt:

sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER

sudo systemctl restart libvirtd

Images:

At the start I tried the official ISO with “drivers ISO” Windows 11 & Virt ISO but I got problems with the network (can’t get internet), and taking a lot of resources (15G of RAM use). Even couldn’t use the image again after a shutdown:

Got this error when trying to activate the VM for the 2nd time- first time after installation is done.

 Error starting domain: internal error: QEMU unexpectedly closed the monitor (vm='win11'): 2025-07-10T19:22:48.974831Z qemu-system-x86_64: -tpmdev passthrough,id=tpm-tpm0,path=/dev/fdset/0,cancel-path=/dev/fdset/1: '/dev/fdset/0' is not a TPM device. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 71, in cb_wrapper callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs) ~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 107, in tmpcb callback(*args, **kwargs) ~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/libvirtobject.py", line 57, in newfn ret = fn(self, *args, **kwargs) File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/domain.py", line 1384, in startup self._backend.create() ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^ File "/usr/lib/python3.13/site-packages/libvirt.py", line 1390, in create raise libvirtError('virDomainCreate() failed') libvirt.libvirtError: internal error: QEMU unexpectedly closed the monitor (vm='win11'): 2025-07-10T19:22:48.974831Z qemu-system-x86_64: -tpmdev passthrough,id=tpm-tpm0,path=/dev/fdset/0,cancel-path=/dev/fdset/1: '/dev/fdset/0' is not a TPM device.

Tiny 11

When looking on the web I saw Tiny 11 . Looks clean, and have nothing on it. I need only the browser most of the time just to get the RDP file. The image is clean, simple, don’t need a lot of resources, and the installation is fast.