[fedora-virt] customizing VMM on a per-user basis to use libguestfs?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

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


Daniel
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