DEBEFIVM-RUN(1)

💖 DEBEFIVM-RUN(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to debefivm-run — it's a manual page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of the world, and it's literally just here to help you boot a whole virtual machine. no cap. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

debefivm-run — run a virtual machine from an EFI-bootable raw disk image 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

-debefivm-run [-a] architecture] [-i image] [-s sshport] [-- qemu options]

(yes that bracket situation is exactly how it's written, we do not touch it, we respect it 💅)

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so like. debefivm-run is essentially a thin wrapper around qemu — the manpage says "thing wrapper" and honestly? iconic typo, we keep it — for running a virtual machine off an UEFI bootable raw disk image. 🔥

you can make one of those images with debefivm-create, or with literally any other image creator you vibe with. but — and this is the important part — its use is limited to architectures that support EFI booting. so if your arch doesn't do EFI, this is not the party for you. 🫶

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -a architecture, --architecture=architecture — override the Debian architecture of the image you're handing over. here's the tea: if the image uses architecture-specific type UUIDs for the root partition, the architecture can be detected automatically. otherwise, the host's architecture is just assumed. the images that debefivm-create makes do use these UUIDs. this value gets used to figure out the correct emulator binary and suitable EFI firmware. ✨
• --efi-vars=variablefile — EFI variables can be changed and retained across reboots of a virtual machine, but only if you supply a separate variable file. if the file you pass doesn't exist yet, it gets created from a template. and if you don't pass one at all? the virtual machine gets a read-only variable store. sad but true. 🙈
• -i image, --image=image — this one says where your virtual machine image file lives. default vibe is vm.img in the working directory. 🍓
• --netopt=option — debefivm-run sets up a user mode network by default, which means it passes a -netdev option to qemu. with this option you can customize the value of that -netdev option. for instance, you can set up additional port forwards by passing e.g. --netopt hostfwd=:127.0.0.1:8080-:80. it can be used multiple times, so go off. 🌈
• --skip=task — skip a particular task or feature. you can specify this option multiple times, or list multiple tasks to skip by separating them with a comma. by default, no tasks are skipped. here's what you can skip:
  • network — do not configure a network card. use this if you want to configure the network on your own. also, you should pass this in addition to passing -nic none when you want to disable networking. both. together. 💀
  • rngdev — do not pass a random number generator device.
• --transport=transport — when debefivm-run adds devices to qemu, it has to select a transport, and it most often guesses pci. but when you specify a different machine such as -machine microvm, a different transport such as device may be needed. iykyk. 🧚
• -s sshport, --sshport=sshport — if given, qemu is configured to pass connections to 127.0.0.1:sshport to port 22 of the virtual machine. you can connect to your virtual machine without updating your known hosts like this:

ssh -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes -p $sshport root@127.0.0.1

this option is a shorthand for --netopt hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:sshport-:22. 💜

• -- qemu options — everything beyond a double dash gets passed straight to qemu. this is how you configure additional hardware components. one possible use of this method is passing -snapshot to avoid modifying the virtual machine image. main character energy tbh. ⭐

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

debefivm-create(1) debvm-run(1) qemu(1)

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bestie reminder: this whole thing is perl v5.40.1 energy, dated 2026-03-23. that's the source and version, and that's the whole page. slay, go boot something. 💖🦋🌸