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The libvirtd daemon provides the traditional libvirt experience where all the drivers are in a single daemon, and is accessible over both local UNIX sockets and remote IP sockets. In the new world we're having a set of per-driver daemons which will primarily be accessed locally via their own UNIX sockets. We still, however, need to allow for case of applications which will connect to libvirt remotely. These remote connections can be done as TCP/TLS sockets, or by SSH tunnelling to the UNIX socket. In the later case, the old libvirt.so clients will only know about the path to the old libvirtd socket /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock, and not the new driver sockets /var/run/libvirt/virtqemud-sock. It is also not desirable to expose the main driver specific daemons over IP directly to minimize their attack service. Thus the virtproxyd daemon steps into place, to provide TCP/TLS sockets, and back compat for the old libvirtd UNIX socket path(s). It will then forward all RPC calls made to the appropriate driver specific daemon. Essentially it is equivalent to the old libvirtd with absolutely no drivers registered except for the remote driver (and other stateless drivers in libvirt.so). We could have modified libvirtd so none of the drivers are registed to get the same end result. We could even add a libvirtd.conf parameter to control whether the drivers are loaded to enable users to switch back to the old world if we discover bugs in the split-daemon model. Using a new daemon though has some advantages - We can make virtproxyd and the virtXXXd per-driver daemons all have "Conflicts: libvirtd.service" in their systemd unit files. This will guarantee that libvirtd is never started at the same time, as this would result in two daemons running the same driver. Fortunately drivers use locking to protect themselves, but it is better to avoid starting a daemon we know will conflict. - It allows us to break CLI compat to remove the --listen parameter. Both listen_tcp and listen_tls parameters in /etc/libvirtd/virtd.conf will default to zero. Either TLS or TCP can be enabled exclusively though virtd.conf without requiring the extra step of adding --listen. - It allows us to set a strict SELinux policy over virtproxyd. For back compat the libvirtd policy must continue to allow all drivers to run. We can't easily give a second policy to libvirtd which locks it down. By introducing a new virtproxyd we can set a strict policy for that daemon only. - It gets rid of the weird naming of having a daemon with "lib" in its name. Now all normal daemons libvirt ships will have "virt" as their prefix not "libvirt". - Distros can more easily choose their upgrade path. They can ship both sets of daemons in their packages, and choose to either enable libvirtd, or enable the per-driver daemons and virtproxyd out of the box. Users can easily override this if desired by just tweaking which systemd units are active. After some time we can deprecate use of libvirtd and after some more time delete it entirely, leaving us in a pretty world filled with prancing unicorns. The main downside with introducing a new daemon, and with the per-driver daemons in general, is figuring out the correct upgrade path. The conservative option is to leave libvirtd running if it was an existing installation. Only use the new daemons & virtproxyd on completely new installs. The aggressive option is to disable libvirtd if already running and activate all the new daemons. Reviewed-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Christophe de Dinechin <dinechin@redhat.com> Signed-off-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 2.0 (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: