On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 05:29:13PM -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
On 01/27/2013 04:44 PM, Tom Horsley wrote:
If I run virt-manager on fedora 18, I see random instances of virtual machines named guestfs-something pop up for a second, then go away.
Where the heck do they come from and why is it happening?
If python-libguestfs is installed, virt-manager will use it in the background to determine guest OS and a few other interesting bits of info. Recently libguestfs grew the ability to do its magic using libvirt rather than a manually launched qemu instance. What you are probably seeing is those transient libguestfs appliances popping in and out of existence.
However I didn't think libguestfs was using libvirt by default on F18, and I didn't think it was connecting qemu:///system, so I'm not entirely sure what's happening. Are you using qemu:///session with virt-manager, or just the default libvirt connection?
Since Fedora 18, libvirt is now the default (but see below).
Rich, any thoughts?
Well this is a bug / missing feature in libvirt. When you create a transient guest libvirt forces you to give it a name, and effectively you have to give it a random name (because other instances of libguestfs might be running at the same time). So we give it a name like guestfs-<random>, but that unfortunately means that a persistent log file is created (probably under $HOME/.cache/libvirt/qemu/log), and you see oddly named guests coming into existence.
We should fix this, but for now you could:
(1) Ignore the guests.
(2) Switch libguestfs to using the 'appliance' backend, which means it directly runs qemu instead of using libvirt (this was the default before Fedora 18):
export LIBGUESTFS_ATTACH_METHOD=appliance
(3) Uninstall python-libguestfs.
Rich.