PolicyKit and libvirt integration

Posted: January 11th, 2008 | Filed under: libvirt, Virt Tools | 3 Comments »

For Fedora 9 one of the new feature’s we’ve got pending for virtualization is integration with PolicyKit. This will allow virt-manager to manage local hypervisor connections without having to run as root via consolehelper. Although the virt-manager part of this won’t be ready for a while yet, the libvirt bits were made available in libvirt 0.4.0 just before christmas. As a sneak preview this is now in updates-testing and already gives you the ability to run virsh as non root.

For example, currently if you run virsh as non-root you’l lsee something like 

$ virsh --connect qemu:///system
libvir: Remote error : authentication failed
error: failed to connect to the hypervisor

Now with PolicyKit support you can use ‘polkit-grant’ to authenticate and then you’ll be able to run virsh without issue! 

$ polkit-grant --gain org.libvirt.unix.manage
Attempting to gain the privilege for org.libvirt.unix.manage.
Authentication is required.
Password:
Keep this privilege for the session? [no/session]?
session
Successfully gained the privilege for org.libvirt.unix.manage.
$ virsh --connect qemu:///system
Welcome to virsh, the virtualization interactive terminal.

Type:  'help' for help with commands
       'quit' to quit

virsh #  start VirtTest
virsh # list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  1 VirtTest             running

In other news, Rich Jones has created a Mozilla Plugin for GTK-VNC so there’s at last a less-sucky replacement for the terrible Java VNC plugins out there