Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:10:31PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> is there a mechanism for customizing VMM settings on a per-user
> basis? i ask since i'd like to test guestfish and libguestfs on a
> recently-created VM but, by default, new VM images are created in
> /var/lib/libvirt/images, and that directory is not accessible to
> non-root users.
>
> as a non-root user, if i was about to start working with VMs, i'd
> like to be able to invoke "virt-manager" and, *before* creating any
> VMs, set some config options, such as where my images are going to go
> (ideally, in a personal images directory). that would make those
> images accessible to my account.
>
> but if i fire up "virt-manager", i can see "Edit" ->
"Preferences"
> but that doesn't allow me that kind of per-user configuration. does
> that kind of configuration even exist? and, with those default
> settings and permissions, how *would* one use libguestfs and guestfish
> as a regular user?
>
> or am i once again missing something critical?
>
There are two classes of libvirt driver connection
- Privileged, per-host connections
- Unprivileged, per-user connections
Xen provides a per-host connection. UserModeLinux and QEMU provide
both (qemu:///system and qemu:///session). VirtualBox just proivides
a per-user instance (vbox:///session) and so on.
Now by default in Fedora, when connecting to QEMU, virt-manager will
use the privileged per-host connection, so VMs end up in the system
directory /var/lib/libvirt/images.
Our goal (perhaps for F12) should be for local desktop virt use
cases to use the unprivileged QEMU connection qemu://session
by default, and have VM disk images stored in your home directory
I'm not sure that home directory is where people would want images, I
suspect that an arbitrary location would be far more flexible. Using KVM
without a VMM, I can put images in someplace obvious, like
$HOME/virtual/Images (with install ISO images in ~/virtual/ISO) so my
virtual machines are not co-mingled with other things. My system stuff
is in /mnt/virtual/Images and people use it by using qemu-img to make a
local qcow2 images for their personal machines (including test config,
obviously).
Questions:
- did I make clear why some flexibility is desirable?
- is there any technical reason not to make this an arbitrary path?
--
bill davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
"You are disgraced professional losers. And by the way, give us our money
back."
- Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota
on the A.I.G. executives who were paid bonuses after a federal bailout.