Have you ever wanted to play with fancy new NVMe, but lack the hardware? Well, luckily, QEMU has all you need to play with NVMe (and even NVMe over Fabrics).

manual starting of QEMU

Just create a backing image file (using dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/nvme.img bs=1M count=4096 for example) and start QEMU like this:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 -cpu host-hda ~/path/to/qemu_disk.qcow2 -boot c \
        -drive file=/path/to/nvme.img,if=none,id=D22 \
	-device nvme,drive=D22,serial=1234

NVMe and virt-manager

Unfortunately, if you want to use virt-manager, things are (as of the time of this writing) not that easy - you need to configure the additional command line arguments manually. Find the UUID of your QEMU-VM in virt-manager, for example b11b447d-00a9-4764-80d9-3d68e88ef686

Just use virsh:

$ virsh
virsh # connect qemu:///system

virsh # edit b11b447d-00a9-4764-80d9-3d68e88ef686

This opens the XML-file describing your VM in your $EDITOR. Change the first line from:

domain type='kvm'

to

<domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>

and add at the very end, just before the </domain> the following:

<qemu:commandline>
	<qemu:arg value='-drive'/>
	<qemu:arg value='file=/path/to/nvme.img,if=none,id=D22'/>
	<qemu:arg value='-device'/>
	<qemu:arg value='nvme,drive=D22,serial=1234'/>
</qemu:commandline>

And save and exit the editor. Then run your VM again

Have a look in /dev:

$ dmesg | grep nvme
[    4.906319] nvme nvme0: pci function 0000:00:0a.0

$ ls /dev/nvme*
/dev/nvme0

Have fun playing with nvme!