A whole afternoon playing around... ok, no, that's not the word... It's been a whole afternoon banging my head against the wall that libvirt and its cousin virt-manager are.

I ended up going back to the ol' trusty shell script I use to fire up my FreeBSD and OpenBSD VMs. This is a desktop, not a server, so the VMs are on just for what I need to run on them (mostly checking portability of code I write) and then, they're shut down. No need for a socket listening in the background or a service to do who knows what.

The thing that really pissed me off was the permissions situation libvirt/libvirt-qemu got me into. I mean... wow, it silently set an ACL entry on my $HOME on its own to unilaterally give itself permissions inside my $HOME. Wow.

Resolve Libvirt Error Unable to Find EFI Firmware

A step by step guide on how to fix the Libvirt Error Unable to Find EFI Firmware by updating the paths in the virtual machine’s configuration.

https://www.adamsdesk.com/posts/resolve-libvirt-error-unable-find-efi-firmware/

Tumbleweed keeps rolling strong in 2025! January brought major updates like #GIMP 3.0 RC & #libvirt 11.0.0. #KDE Plasma 6.2.5 & more also arrived in #snapshots. #openSUSE https://news.opensuse.org/2025/01/29/tw-monthly-update-january/

Just made a major shake-up of my infrastructure… having cleared my 16-core workhorse of VMs, I've replaced the Debian Buster OS on there, with a shiny new #AlpineLinux OS.

My Mastodon instance is currently running on the 8-core node I resurrected last week and finalised yesterday.

I'm finding a few things are different with #libvirt under Alpine, notably support for SPICE seems lacking out-of-the-box (so VNC console only) and I've still got oddities with RBD pools, but VMs still successfully connect to RBD back-ends anyway.

It's nice to have nodes running up-to-date OSes. I might need to fine-tune some things, but generally I'm happy with this.

libvirt 11.0.0 released with VLAN support on standard Linux host bridges, support for VLAN tagging and trunking in the network, qemu and lxc drivers

https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/blob/master/NEWS.rst

Ever so often I find an old #qemu VM and when starting it I see:

$ virsh start myvm
error: Failed to start domain 'myvm'
error: unsupported configuration: Emulator '/usr/bin/kvm' does not support machine type 'pc-0.12'

(which happens since qemu removed the pc-0.12 machine type a while back)

Now one could fix the domain XML by hand by why not let a script do it? Turns out #Ubuntu shipped one but removed it already. It's still in their version control though: https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvirt/tree/debian/libvirt-migrate-qemu-machinetype?h=applied/ubuntu/xenial

Really like how #libvirt's

virsh migrate --copy-storage-all myvm qemu+ssh://user@whatever.new.host/system

is simpler than scp/rsyncing things over.

I've been using #virtiofs to access the host filesystem in my #guix #kvm #libvirt #VMs - it's very nice. I have it mount the directory automatically in my guix-system definition:

(file-system
(mount-point "/home/la/workspace")
(device "workspace")
(type "virtiofs")

Guix also supports the 9p filesystem and others.

How do I make #libvirt request & use prefix delegation to give my VMs globally routable, externally visible #IPv6 addresses? (I don't want bridging, I specifically want routing/forwarding with prefix delegation, just like any router does.)

It seems to default to giving VMs no IPv6 connectivity at all, not even outbound (how is this acceptable?), and seemingly the recommended (the only supported?) way to get IPv6 is to use NAT?

I almost never fully exercise this 10+ year old xeon, but every once in a while I'll do some multitasking and I thought I'd share a screenshot to commemorate. I could hardly tell it was chugging away at #liveslak while I spun up a win10 vm to run some weekly reports. #slackware #libvirt

J'ai envie de tester trois solutions de virtualisation...
#VirtualBox
#VMware #Workstation
#KVM (#libvirt #virtmanager)
Ressources communes...
- 8 vCPU ;
- 8192 Mo de RAM ;
- Stockage virtuel de 240 Go sur disque physique #SSD #SATA ;
Stockage des solutions...
- VirtualBox : #vdi cache E/S hôte ;
- VMware Workstation : #vmdk cache write ;
- KVM : #qcow2 cache writeback ;
CPU des solutions...
- KVM : host-passthrough
Tâche à effectuer...
Build (construction) de la distribution #Emmabuntüs ...

Using vagrant with #libvirt on #fedora 40
https://ludovic.hirlimann.net/2024/04/using-vagrant-with-libvirt-on-fedora-40.html

Running OpenBSD as an UEFI virtual machine (on a Raspberry Pi)

https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2024/02/25/run-opentbsd-as-a-vm-on-pi/

I didn’t find much information on how to run #OpenBSD with #UEFI on #x86 or #arm64

So I decided to write a blog post about it, in the hope that this information might be useful to somebody else.

#linux #kvm #libvirt #raspberrypi #homelab #bsd

#stafwag @stafwag

Reworked the first part of the #Libvirt #NixOS wiki page https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Libvirt

GNOME Boxes still has a lot of issues for day-to-day usage.

It doesn't support configuring CPU allocation or even disabling network access to a "Box".

Unless it's for just checking out a distro, I really can't recommend it even for regular users. Virt-manager or VirtualBox are much better alternatives.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/virtualization-on-the-linux-desktop-gnome-boxes-vs-virt-manager/

Wow, the #libvirt #Terraform provider is scary.

It seems mostly unmaintained.

It uses an outdated crypto lib with custom modifications. https://github.com/dmacvicar/terraform-provider-libvirt/blob/main/go.mod#L80

First attempt to import a resource led to a provider crash on nil dereference.

Unfortunately, I see no alternatives... I might have to fall back on another hypervisor and that makes me sad.