Initial Fedora libvirt Setup

Dec 16, 2016 · 2 minute read · Comments
libvirtlinuxvirtualization

There are always a few things I need to do to get libvirt working with a non-root user on Fedora that I need to do, and typically results in some Google researching. Here are some notes of what I recently did to get my libvirt setup going on a new Fedora 25 installation and working with a non-root user.

NOTE I found this tuxfixer blog post while doing some other research for this blog post, which basically does everything I’m about to say, but he does some other network setup and things I’d have done via nmcli and the console. See my other blog post about creating a network bridge with nmcli for libvirt.

Installing packages

First thing to do is install the Virtualization group with dnf, then enable and start with systemd.

$ sudo dnf install @virtulization
$ sudo systemctl enable libvirt
$ sudo systemctl start libvirt

Permissions setup

I want to use libvirt with my logged in user, so we need to setup some permissions. First add to the kvm user group. You’ll need to log back in to validate. Then you can run groups at the console to confirm your groups.

$ sudo usermod -a -G kvm leifmadsen

Then add the following contents to the bottom of your /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/49-polkit-pkla-compat.rules file.

polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.libvirt.unix.manage" &&
        subject.isInGroup("kvm")) {
            return polkit.Result.YES;
        }
});

I’m not sure if this is entirely necessary, but I restart polkit.

sudo systemctl restart polkit.service
sudo sysetmctl status polkit.service

Conclusion

That should be about it really! Try running virt-manager or using virt-install to instantiate your first virtual machine to validate everything is setup as it should be.