29cd1877ac
Our current defaults are root:wheel on FreeBSD and macOS, root:root
everywhere else.
Looking at what downstream distributions actually do, we can see that
these defaults are overriden the vast majority of the time, with a
number of variations showing up in the wild:
* qemu:qemu -> Used by CentOS, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, RHEL
and... As it turns out, our very own spec file :)
* libvirt-qemu:libvirt-qemu -> Used by Debian.
* libvirt-qemu:kvm -> Used by Ubuntu.
* nobody:nobody -> Used by Arch Linux.
Based on this information, we can do a better job at integrating with
downstream packages: if the distro-specific user and group already
exist on the system then we use them, and if not (or we're building
on an unknown OS) we just use root:root as we would have before.
This change makes it less likely that people building from source
will end up running their guests as root, which is a very desiderable
outcome from the security point of view.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Libvirt API for virtualization
Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER Hypervisor.
For some of these hypervisors, it provides a stateful management daemon which runs on the virtualization host allowing access to the API both by non-privileged local users and remote users.
Layered packages provide bindings of the libvirt C API into other languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, OCaml, as well as mappings into object systems such as GObject, CIM and SNMP.
Further information about the libvirt project can be found on the website:
License
The libvirt C API is distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General
Public License, version 2.1 (or later). Some parts of the code that are
not part of the C library may have the more restrictive GNU General
Public License, version 2.1 (or later). See the files COPYING.LESSER
and COPYING for full license terms & conditions.
Installation
Libvirt uses the GNU Autotools build system, so in general can be built and installed with the usual commands. For example, to build in a manner that is suitable for installing as root, use:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
$ make
$ sudo make install
While to build & install as an unprivileged user
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
$ make
$ make install
The libvirt code relies on a large number of 3rd party libraries. These will
be detected during execution of the configure script and a summary printed
which lists any missing (optional) dependencies.
Contributing
The libvirt project welcomes contributions in many ways. For most components the best way to contribute is to send patches to the primary development mailing list. Further guidance on this can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/contribute.html
Contact
The libvirt project has two primary mailing lists:
- libvirt-users@redhat.com (for user discussions)
- libvir-list@redhat.com (for development only)
Further details on contacting the project are available on the website: