da1ade7a52
The libvirtd daemon has some arbitrary logic to drop privileges, but only on Solaris platforms. This was added during Xen days, when Xen was the only driver running in libvirtd. There's no expectation or testing that this works with the new libxl stack, nor whether dropping privileges breaks any of the secondary drivers. Finally, we'll be splitting drivers out into their own independant daemons, so this won't be applicable to libvirtd in future anyway. The remote driver client meanwhile arbitrarily disables daemon auto-spawn when connecting as non-root, breaking a key feature of libvirt unprivileged connections. Since we've not had any contributions for Solaris since circa 2012 and we don't do any CI testing we should consider this platform unmaintained and thus reasonable to remove this cruft. If someone steps forward to maintain Solaris again, this code would need re-evaluating to come up with something more targetted. There's various __sun conditionals in the Xen driver code, but those are not touched. This is all for the legacy Xen driver, which will be entirely removed at some point in future, so not benefit to hacking out just the Solaris parts. Reviewed-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@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 2.1 (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: