User:Egberts/libvirt

The virt-manager application is a Article description::desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (linux containers). It presents a summary view of running domains, their live performance & resource utilization statistics. Wizards enable the creation of new domains, and configuration & adjustment of a domain’s resource allocation & virtual hardware. An embedded VNC and SPICE client viewer presents a full graphical console to the guest domain [//virt-manager.org].

Requirements
The virt-manager requires the package. See libvirt for installation.

System User/Group
Group name libvirt is requried. Defined by ; evoked by package.

Kernel Configuration
The following kernel config is recommended by the libvirt installer.

Portage Configuration (USE flags)
You will want to make sure is built with support for the various virtual networking solutions:

User Permissions
After emerging, to run virt-manager as a normal user, ensure each user has been added to the group:

Uncomment the following lines from the libvirtd configuration file:

Be sure to have the user log out then log in again for the new group settings to be applied.

Issue the following command to restart the libvirtd service under OpenRC:

Issue the following command to restart the libvirtd service under systemd:

should now be launchable as a regular user.

Files

 * - Global (system wide) configuration file.

USE flags
Some packages are aware of the USE flag.

Review the possible USE flags for QEMU:

USE_EXPAND
Additional ebuild configuration frobs are provided as the USE_EXPAND variables QEMU_USER_TARGETS and QEMU_SOFTMMU_TARGETS. See for a list of all the available targets (there are a heck of a lot of them; most of them are very obscure and may be ignored; leaving these variables at their default values will disable almost everything which is probably just fine for most users).

For each target specified, a qemu executable will be built. A  target is the standard qemu use-case of emulating an entire system (like VirtualBox or VMWare, but with optional support for emulating CPU hardware along with peripherals). targets execute user-mode code only; the (somewhat shockingly ambitious) purpose of these targets is to "magically" allow importing user-space linux ELF binaries from a different architecture into the native system (that is, they are like multilib, without the awkward need for a software stack or CPU capable of running it).

In order to enable QEMU_USER_TARGETS and QEMU_SOFTMMU_TARGETS we can edit the variables globally in, i.e.:

Or, the file(s) can be modified. Two equivalent syntaxes are available: traditional USE flag syntax, i.e.:

Another alternative is to use the newer sexy USE_EXPAND -specific syntax:

Install QEMU host
After reviewing and adding any desired USE flags, emerge :

Reboot the host.

Verify QEMU host
To verify that the host hardware has the needed virtualization support, issue the following command:

The vmx or svm CPU flag should be red highlighted and available.

File must exist.

Checking networking
Network interfaces for virt-manager can be checked by running