Tag: vm

Using Jetbrains products in a VM and on the host at the same time

I have been hacking on some libcamera experiment, and this time I had the misfortune to have to try and use a Jetbrains product in a local VM and on the host system at the same time.

Since it is practical I was using UTM shared networking, but that had the unfortunate side effect that Clion in the VM and IntelliJ on the host detected each other and refused to both be open at the same time. Incredibly annoying…

Googling I figured out that if you use the same username in the VM and on the host it will all work out. I got more and more confused as to why this feature exists, but a glimmer of hope emerged. I was not ready to change user in the VM or on the host though, since I had used some time to set up that user.

Thankfully, this detection feature uses the JVM system property user.name, to lookup the user, so adding -Duser.name=<host username> to the clion64.vmoptions file made it all work out.

Major annoyance averted!

Expanding the disk on a QEMU run Ubuntu VM

A few days ago I started up an Ubuntu VM to run some silly experiment. Suddenly I needed a bit more space though, and instead of creating a new disk I decided to expand the current one instead. This took some time to figure out, so posting it here for my future self and others who possibly might want to do this.

Since there was nothing of real importance on this VM, I did most steps on the VM while it was running. Take backups if you attempt this and care about your data, I am not sure all of it is safe.

I am running QEMU using UTM on my M1 mac, and the .qcow2 files get put somewhere deep in the users Library folder by default. Once I found the file, I shut down the VM and did this on the host:

qemu-img resize disk-0.qcow2 50G

Then I started the VM, installed gparted and expanded the partition. df still reported the disk to be 90% full though. Eventually I figured that I also needed to expand the logical volume. The command to do this was:

sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/<volume name>

But still df reported the volume to be full. Seems the ext4 filesystem also needs to be expanded. This did the job:

sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/<volume name>

Finally df reports lots of free space! Sweet!

At the beginning, I shut down the VM before I did the first resizing of the .qcow2 file. I am not sure that was necessary. The next time I need to expand a disk on an unimportant VM, I will try without shutting it down for sure.