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

[Cole Robinson]

On 04/21/2009 02:12 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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
> 

How would we allow KVM access? Unix groups or something else?

- Cole