Switching to QEMU

Welcome back! If this is your first visit to VeXation you may want to start at the beginning.

Recap and Yak Shaving 🔗

It’s been some time since the last post and I was looking for a light way to get back into the swing of things. Return readers might recall that I’ve been doing all of the VeXation development in a Windows 95 VM running in VirtualBox. I described the setup for this environment in the second post in the series based on a popular blog post by socket3.

Recently I’ve been using NixOS on my laptop and I’ve been really happy with the clean config I’ve arrived at. It felt crummy to sully my new system with the (dubious quality) VirtualBox kernel module just to run a dinky Windows VM. Why not get back into the project with some dev. env. yak shaving? In that spirit, today I’ll walk through how I set up a new Windows 95 development environment with QEMU/KVM and configured file-sharing.

QEMU/KVM 🔗

QEMU is a light-weight machine emulator and virtualizer perfect for this sort of project because it’s both easy to script and has nice low-level features in the monitor console. In my case, since I’m running a qemu-system-x86 image on a Linux host machine that is x86 compatible it made sense to pair QEMU with KVM, which QEMU handily supports. On the quality front I generally feel better loading an in-tree Linux kernel module like KVM than I did with VirtualBox’s 3rd party module.

To get everything set up I changed my NixOS config to add the kvm-intel kernel module and to install the qemu, qemu-utils and qemu_kvm packages:

...
boot.kernelModules = [ "kvm-intel" ];
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  ...
  qemu
  qemu-utils
  qemu_kvm
];
...

After a quick nixos-rebuild switch I’m ready to get started creating a Windows 95 VM. For this post I was using QEMU 5.1.0 on Linux Kernel 5.11.x.

Windows 95 Setup 🔗

The QEMU Wiki has a whole page for Windows 95 but it’s unfortunately pretty old and recommends using command line flags that result in warnings with modern QEMU. It also describes a clunky process for digging through the virtual NIC’s settings post-install to fix networking that isn’t necessary with some additional CLI flags. With some trial and error I was able to arrive at a process that used up-to-date CLI flags and needed no post-install messing around with IRQs.

Preparation 🔗

Like the first setup post I needed to gather a few resources before starting:

I downloaded and extracted all of the .ISO and .IMG files and put them in a disks subfolder in preparation for mounting into QEMU as required.

Creating the VM 🔗

To create the VM I first created a 2GB QCOW2 disk image named vexation.qcow2 with qemu-img:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 vexation.qcow2 2G

Next I started up a VM backed by the QCOW2 disk image to begin the Windows 95 install.

qemu-system-i386 \
  -m 64 \
  -cpu pentium \
  -vga cirrus \
  -drive file=vexation.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
  -drive file=disks/Win95.OSR2.boot.img,format=raw,index=0,if=floppy \
  -cdrom disks/win95_full_ar.osr2_en.iso \
  -audiodev pa,id=snd0 \
  -netdev user,id=vexnet \
  -device ne2k_isa,irq=3,netdev=vexnet \
  -boot order=a \
  --enable-kvm

Let’s talk through the more interesting qemu-system-i386 parameters:

  • -m 64 - this gives the VM 64 MB of RAM. More than enough for Win95.
  • -audiodev pa,id=snd0 - this configures the VM to use PulseAudio for the virtual audio device backend.
  • -netdev user,id=vexnet - this configures the VM with user mode networking and a named network.
  • -device ne2k_isa,irq=3,netdev=vexnet - this configures the VM with a compatible virtual NIC and, crucially, sets the IRQ to 3 so I don’t have to muck around with settings later.
  • -boot order=a - this configures the VM to boot from the boot floppy.
  • --enable-kvm - this enables KVM virtualization and makes the VM much faster.

Before figuring out the right -audiodev setting the sound “worked” but in a way that resulted in some pretty interesting remixes…

After the initial setup the same command can be used to boot the VM, but the -boot order=a parameter should be changed to -boot order=c. I definitely recommend making an alias or small script to avoid having to remember all of these qemu params!

Quick QEMU tips: To stop the guest from eating mouse cursor/keyboard input use CTRL-ALT-G. To enlarge the viewing area use CTRL-ALT-+. To drop to a powerful QEMU monitor console use CTRL-ALT-2 and list commands with help.

Installing Windows 🔗

After the VM starts it’s just the barren wasteland of a DOS prompt from the Windows 95 boot floppy. The first order of business is to format the C:\ drive so I can launch the CDROM installer.

  1. At the DOS prompt, I entered fdisk, input “Y”, and chose defaults from there. At the end, when prompted, I reset the VM.

  2. After the VM resets and I’m back at the DOS prompt I entered format C:, then “Y”. At the end I gave the disk a stupid label.

  3. Next I launched the Win 95 installer by running D:\setup

This time around I realized it’s actually possible to configure TCP/IP during the install process instead of after the fact if you choose “Custom” on the screen titled “Setup Options” which was a nice optimization (it saves one whole reboot cycle!).

In general I accepted defaults in most cases except for these exceptions:

  • On the “setup options” screen, I chose “custom”.

Win95 Setup Options screenshot
Choose custom to be able to setup TCP/IP during install.

  • On the “Analyzing your computer” screen, I clicked the checkbox for both “Network Adapter” and “Sound, MIDI, or Video Capture Card”.

Win95 Analyzing Your Computer screenshot
Let the installer analyze NICs and Sound Cards.

  • On the “Network Configuration” screen I removed everything but the “NE2000 Compatible” NIC.

Win95 Network Configuration screenshot
Clearing out everything but the NIC

  • Then I added a Protocol, choosing Microsoft from the Manufacturers list and “TCP/IP” from the Network Protocols list.
  • Then I added a Client, choosing Microsoft from the Manufacturers list and “Client for Microsoft Networks” from the Network Clients list.

Win95 Network Configuration screenshot
TCP/IP and Samba setup.

  • On the “Identification” screen, I set the workgroup to “WORKGROUP” in anticipation of using a boring Samba config for file-sharing between the host and VM.

Win95 Identification screenshot
Setting the Samba workgroup.

  • On the “Startup Disk” screen I chose “No, I do not want a startup disk”.

At the final “Finishing Setup” screen I switch to the QEMU monitor with CTRL-ALT-2 and eject the boot disk with eject floppy0. After that it’s safe to let the VM reboot to complete the install.

The QEMU monitor console (CTRL-ALT-2) supports mounting/unmounting images as required. To change the floppy disk image (e.g. to change the Borland TASM install disk) use:

change floppy0 <path to floppy image>

To change the CD image use:

change ide1-cd0 <path to CDROM iso>

After the first boot I installed SciTools Display Doctor 7 and did the reboot dance to get a better 1024x768 resolution. After that I installed Borland Turbo Assembler 5.0 and edited autoexec.bat to add it to the system PATH with:

Set PATH=%PATH%;C:\TASM\BIN

Besides using the QEMU monitor to change the disk images the process was the same as in my previous setup post so I won’t bother repeating the steps here.

Networking and File-Sharing 🔗

In my previous VirtualBox setup I used bridge mode networking and essentially put the Win95 VM on the real network (eek). To alleviate my fears I would tactically enable/disable the virtual NIC to try and reduce the attack surface of the VM. To share files I would connect from the host machine to a shared folder exposed by the guest VM using smbclient manually. Overall it was not a great setup…

This time around I chose to use QEMU’s user mode networking. This meant the VM is not accessible to the wider network (but can still reach out). I also decided to run a smbd process on my host machine that was only exposed to localhost to allow the VM to easily mount a shared folder from the host.

To start I verified the connectivity of the VM. If the IRQ of the virtual NIC wasn’t specified correctly in the -device argument to qemu-system-i386, or it wasn’t configured specifically to match the QEMU default in Windows device manager you’re likely to see no connectivity at this stage. Roughly my process to confirm things were working was to:

  1. Open a command shell.
  2. Run winipcfg to see the current DHCP lease and associated config. The VM should have an IP like 10.0.2.15 and a default gateway of 10.0.2.2.

Win95 winipcfg screenshot
Checking the VM IP configuration with winipcfg.

  1. Run ping 10.0.2.2 to confirm the VM can ping the host.

When everything looked good I switched back to the host to configure Samba in NixOS.

Samba Configuration 🔗

QEMU has a feature to launch smbd automatically with a special config for VM/Host file-sharing but I couldn’t get it working when I tried and so ultimately decided to run a normal NixOS samba service on the host and connect to it directly from the VM. To get Samba running on my host I updated my NixOS config to add:

...
services.samba = {
  enable = true;
  securityType = "user";
  extraConfig = ''
    workgroup = WORKGROUP
    server string = NOIR
    netbios name = NOIR
    security = user
    hosts allow = localhost
    hosts deny = 0.0.0.0/0
    guest account = nobody
    map to guest = bad user
    load printers = no
    server min protocol = LANMAN1
  '';
  shares = {
    portal = {
      path = "/mnt/portal";
      browseable = "yes";
      "read only" = "no";
      "guest ok" = "yes";
      "create mask" = "0644";
      "directory mask" = "0755";
    };
  };
};
...

For the most part this is a vanilla Samba configuration to allow guest read/write access to /mnt/portal on the host however there are a couple of notable changes:

  • workgroup = WORKGROUP to match the Windows configuration.
  • hosts allow localhost and host deny = 0.0.0.0/0 to block access except for localhost.
  • server min protocol = LANMAN1 to allow Windows 95’s crusty SMB stack to work with this modern Samba version (4.12.x).

Another nixos-rebuild switch and Samba is running and ready for the VM to connect.

Configuring File-Sharing 🔗

Inside the VM I had to configure the host lookup behaviour for file-sharing by editing C:\WINDOWS\LMHOSTS (with notepad in the GUI or edit on the command line). This file needs to be updated to contain:

10.0.2.2 smbserver

Finally (after a reboot for good measure) it’s possible to open \\NOIR\PORTAL in the VM and share files to/from the host machine, all without broadly exposing the VM (or its file-sharing) to the wider internet. Nice!

Win95 Fileshare screenshot
File sharing between host and VM

Conclusion 🔗

Once file-sharing was set up it was easy to copy all of my work-in-progress code and supporting resources (win32 API help, texteditor install, etc) from the host to the VM. Overall it’s much quicker to create and modify the VM using QEMU and some small scripts compared to using the VirtualBox GUI. Additionally using user mode networking with a localhost bound smbd makes me feel a little better about security concerns. Another nice bonus is that the QEMU Monitor supports a ton of really interesting functionality. Down the road I expect commands like dump-guest-memory will become valuable debugging tools.

Now that I have a working development environment recreated I’m ready to get back to writing some assembly code and updating the virus with more functionality. As a first task I think it would be fun to restore the modification date of infected files to get a little bit more stealth on the cheap. Hope to see you then!

As always, I would love to hear feedback about this project. Feel free to drop me a line on twitter (@cpu) or by email (daniel@binaryparadox.net).