qemu linux guest no sound

[Da51d]

Does anyone know how to get sound working with qemu. I have installed Kali, using virt-manager, and it is excellent, but I cannot make the sound work. The host has pulseaudio as the sound-server, but the only output shown in the guest pavucontrol says "dummy output".

[Ralphred]

I has this issue when doing GPU passthrough (audio comes through the VNC link IIRC).
I had to add a usb sound card to the VM. It doesn't have usb as a default option in VMM, so I just added any other and edited the xml

[szatox]

[Da51d]

Thanks both for your help. The process is this (I am using my laptop as the host machine and not connecting remotely or anything like that):
I open virt-manager from the apps menu, click on file...new virtual machine...select the iso...and run through the "wizard", selecting "Generic Linux 2022" as the operating system I am installing, select RAM size and number of cpus, size of virtual machine disk etc, and and then hit "finish".
After that, it is much like a standard installation of any Linux distribution...essentially the same process as installing,say Debian.
I am pursuing several lines of enquiry, but I must confess I don't really understand much of what I am reading yet. My guess is the vm does not have an audio device, and I must find a way to make it use the laptop's sound card.
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[szatox]

Ok, if you use virt-manager, double click your VM, go to virtual hardware details (there's an icon in the corner, next to virtual console), and check what is actually exposed to the guest.
If sound device is missing, just add it. There is no need to complicate your life with pass-through. With an emulated audio device your vm should be able to play sounds through the console as long as you're connected to it (including over the network, if you ever wanted to work remotely).
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[Da51d]

Thanks again for your response. I have tried this, but still no sound. There are 3 options: HDA(ICH9), HDA(ICH6) and AC97, and I have tried each in turn, but to no avail.
_________________
What can be said at all can be said clearly and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

[Ralphred]

[Anon-E-moose]

What does "qemu-system-x86_64 --audiodev help" return?

Edit to add: I don't do pulseaudio, but with pipewire you need something similar to this (qemu cmd line)

[szatox]

[Da51d]

Apologies szatox if I was unclear.

[szatox]

Ok, so you now have a single analog audio device. Looks good.
What do you mean by "can't be unmuted in pavucontrol"?

Does aplay -L list sensible output options? Check alsamixer too, I don't use pulseaudio, but all sound servers depend on alsa, so you surely can access its controls directly. It would be good to confirm it's a problem with guest's pulseaudio. Speaking of which, maybe it's not started for whatever reason?
What OS do you run inside that VM anyway? Can you try running some kind of "just works" LiveCD inside your VM to test your setup?
BTW, audio editing software like audacity is good for testing outputs too, since it allows selecting playback device manually; Particularly useful when defaults don't match your system.
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