DEBEFIVM-CREATE(1)

📦
version 0.5.2ubuntu1 · 3 versions
, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ DEBEFIVM-CREATE ✨

okay bestie, so this is a User Contributed Perl Documentation page, section 1 of the manual — it's debefivm-create, and it's literally about to hand you a bootable EFI VM image 💅

💖 NAME 💖

debefivm-create — create an EFI-bootable VM image for various Debian releases and architectures 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

debefivm-create [-h hostname] [-k sshkey] [-o output] [-r release] [-s <task>] [-z size] [-- mmdebstrap options]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so the whole vibe here is: you run this, and you get an EFI-bootable disk image that boots straight into Debian 🔥 It's basically a thin wrapper around mmdebstrap, much like debvm-create — same energy, different flavor.

The resulting image has a GPT partition table with an EFI system partition in it. A Unified Kernel Image gets constructed from the installed kernel and initrd, and that gets placed into said partition. so it's giving very put-together, very bootable ✨

Because of that, this image can be booted with a whole bunch of virtual machine emulators like incus, libvirt or VirtualBox. It may also be booted using debefivm-run 🫶

no user account is created and root can login without specifying a password. periodt. that's just how it is 😭

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • -a architecture, --architecture=architecture — sets the architecture of the virtual machine 💫 This one gets forwarded to mmdebstrap, and you can supply multiple architectures. The first architecture is the one used to assemble the Unified Kernel Image. Defaults to the native architecture of the installation.
  • -h hostname, --hostname=hostname — sets the hostname of the virtual machine 🏠 By default, the hostname is testvm.
  • -k sshkey, --sshkey=sshkey — installs the given ssh public key file into the virtual machine image, for the root user 🔑 This option also causes the ssh server to be installed. By default, no key or server is installed. To connect to the vm, pass a port number to debefivm-run with the -s option.
  • -o output, --output=output — picks the file name of the resulting virtual machine image 📁 By default, it gets written to vm.img.
  • -r release, --release=release — use the given Debian release 🌈 By default, unstable is being used. If you pass a complete sources.list that includes release names to mmdebstrap, you may pass an empty string here.
  • -s task, --skip=task — skips a particular task or feature 🙈 You can specify this option multiple times, or list multiple tasks separated by a comma. By default, no tasks are skipped. Here's what you can skip:
    • autologin — don't set the machine up for automatic password-less root login on the console 🚫 This comprises the following changes that would normally be performed: automatic root login is configured for the init systems finit, runit, systemd and sysv. Forwarding of the "TERM" kernel command line to agetty is configured. The root password is deleted such that a login does not ask for it and the system directly boots to a shell prompt.
    • kernel — skips installing a linux kernel image 🐧 This can be useful to install a kernel without a package. If a kernel is installed via the mmdebstrap option --include, automatic kernel installation is automatically skipped.
    • packagelists — reduces the package lists inside the image 📦 The available database for dpkg is not created. The package lists used by apt are deleted. This generally produces a smaller image, but you need to run apt update before installing packages, and dpkg --set-selections does not work. so like, trade-offs, bestie 💀
    • systemdnetwork — skips installing libnss-resolve as well as automatic network configuration via systemd-networkd 📡
    • usrmerge — by default debefivm-create adds a hook to enable merged-/usr without the usrmerge package, given a sufficiently recent Debian release 🌿 Without the hook, dependencies will pull the usrmerge package as needed, which may result in a larger installation.
  • --rootsize=size — you can use this as an alternative to --imagesize to determine the size of the output image 📏 It's also composed of an integer with an optional unit. Unlike --imagesize, it determines the size of the root filesystem partition, and the resulting image will be slightly larger than the size given here.
  • -z size, --imagesize=size — specify the total image size as an integer and optional unit (example: 10K is 10*1024) 💾 Units are K,M,G,T (powers of 1024). The disk image contains an EFI system partition and an ext4 root filesystem. The EFI partition has a static size of about 128MB, and the remaining space gets allocated to the root filesystem. The default is 10 GB.
  • -- mmdebstrap options — everything beyond a double dash gets passed to mmdebstrap after the suite and target specification 🚀 This can be used to provide additional hooks for image customization. You can also request additional packages to be installed into the image using mmdebstrap's --include option. Any positional arguments passed here will be treated as mirror specifications by mmdebstrap.
⚠️ the --architecture option should not be given here, because debefivm-create needs to know its value to construct a Unified Kernel Image. no cap, it genuinely needs it.

🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

create an image suitable for use with autopkgtest-virt-qemu --efi 🎯

debefivm-create ... -- --include=linux-image-generic,libpam-systemd,passwd,python3 --hook-dir=/usr/share/mmdebstrap/hooks/useradd --customize-hook=/usr/share/autopkgtest/setup-commands/setup-testbed

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

and that's the whole page bestie, iykyk 💜 this one shipped as perl v5.40.1, dated 2026-03-23 — go make some iconic bootable images, mwah 🫶✨💅

📦 where this page comes from