Does not work on Ubuntu 18.04

Found this line in the logs:

INFO[0073] [hostagent] time="2021-10-11T16:13:13-07:00" level=fatal msg="failed to run [/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -M none -netdev help]: stdout=\"\", stderr=\"Possible accelerators: kvm, xen, hax, tcg\\nqemu-system-x86_64: -netdev help: Parameter 'id' is missing\\n\""

If I upgrade the system from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 then rancher-desktop starts working. It would be nice for 18.04 to work since that version is still has supported until April 2023, and I have several teammates that use 18.04 who can not upgrade.

Ubuntu 18.04 has qemu 2.11.1, and Ubuntu 20.04 has qemu 4.2.1. Perhaps some command line flags changed between the versions?

[davidcassany]

Right, I finally found the root cause of this issue. Lima does not properly support openSSH earlier than v8.0. Ubuntu Bionic ships with openSSH v7.6 which does not include URI support in command line clients. See lima-vm/lima#386.

I did a build manually including a patched lima with the mentioned PR and RD worked smooth.

[jandubois]

Sorry, I didn’t update the issue last night, but it looks like I got Lima working on Bionic:

jan@ubuntu:~$ grep PRETTY /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS"
jan@ubuntu:~$ lima grep PRETTY /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 21.04"

There were 3 changes I had to make:

• Don’t fail if -netdev help is not implemented.
• Check stderr for -accel help output when stdout is empty.
• Don’t change ciphers when OpenSSH is older than 8.0.0 (this Lima change may not be in RD 0.6.0)

I still have to clean up the patch, so that the code checking openssh features doesn’t happen before logging is initialized.