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Ismayil Mirzali
Ismayil Mirzali

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Kubernetes: Minikube with QEMU/KVM on Arch

#kubernetes #docker #archlinux #virtualization

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Minikube is a tool for easily creating Kubernetes clusters locally.

It boasts features like supporting multiple container runtimes and even Load Balancers so you can easily test your deployments/services locally.

Minikube lets you deploy your node as a VM, container or even bare metal. The default driver is VirtualBox, however KVM/QEMU usually performs better on Linux machines.

I assume that you'll be using Docker as your CRI. On Arch Linux, you'll need to get the following packages using Pacman:

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ sudo pacman -S minikube libvirt qemu dnsmasq ebtables dmidecode
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You then need to add your user to the libvirt group and start the service:

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ sudo usermod -aG libvirt $(whoami) 🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service 🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.service
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The libvirtd service may fail due to certain missing binaries, be sure to check the status and resolve any issues you may have.

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ sudo systemctl status libvirtd.service
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You can then run the validation tool:

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ virt-host-validate QEMU: Checking for hardware virtualization : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/kvm exists : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/kvm is accessible : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/vhost-net exists : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/net/tun exists : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'cpu' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'cpuacct' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'cpuset' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'memory' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'devices' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'blkio' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for device assignment IOMMU support : PASS QEMU: Checking if IOMMU is enabled by kernel : PASS QEMU: Checking for secure guest support : WARN (AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization appears to be disabled in kernel. Add kvm_amd.sev=1 to the kernel cmdline arguments) LXC: Checking for Linux >= 2.6.26 : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace ipc : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace mnt : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace pid : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace uts : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace net : PASS LXC: Checking for namespace user : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'cpu' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'cpuacct' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'cpuset' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'memory' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'devices' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'freezer' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking for cgroup 'blkio' controller support : PASS LXC: Checking if device /sys/fs/fuse/connections exists : PASS
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Change the Minikube driver to kvm2:

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ minikube config set driver kvm2
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It's nice to create a seperate kubeconfig file for Minikube to use for the cluster:

🐺 ~ ⚡ ➜ touch config && export KUBECONFIG=$(pwd)/config
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Finally, run minikube:

🐺 ~/repos ➜ minikube start 😄 minikube v1.12.2 on Arch ▪ KUBECONFIG=/home/lemagicien/repos/config ✨ Using the kvm2 driver based on user configuration 👍 Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube 🔥 Creating kvm2 VM (CPUs=2, Memory=4000MB, Disk=20000MB) ... 🐳 Preparing Kubernetes v1.18.3 on Docker 19.03.12 ... 🔎 Verifying Kubernetes components... 🌟 Enabled addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner 🏄 Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"
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Your kubectl should now be talking to the minikube cluster! If you run into any issues, you can check Minikube Docs and ArchWiki.

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