Installation guide

Verify your system supports virtualization. On Intel based systems, run grep -c vmx /proc/cpuinfo to verify the presence of the vmx flags. On AMD based systems, run grep -c svm /proc/cpuinfo. See KVM processor support for more information.

Debian/Ubuntu

This guide shows how to install KVM virtualization and virt-up on Debian and Ubuntu systems. Virtualization maybe installed on graphical desktop or a non-graphical server.

See Debian KVM for more information.

Installing KVM

Install virtualization packages with apt:

$ sudo apt install \
    qemu-system libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system \
    virtinst qemu-utils libguestfs-tools libvirt-dev \
    osinfo-db-tools

Tip: Specify the --no-install-recommends apt option to avoid installing graphical packages when installing a server.

Add users to the libvirt and kvm groups to grant them permission to manage virtual machines on the hypervisor:

$ sudo useradd -a -G libvirt <username>
$ sudo useradd -a -G kvm <username>

This takes affect on your next login.

Download and install the most recent OS Info Database:

$ wget https://releases.pagure.org/libosinfo/osinfo-db-<VERSION>.tar.xz
$ sudo osinfo-db-import --local osinfo-db-<VERSION>.tar.xz

The graphical virt-manager tool is useful to have on a desktop system. If the kvm hypervisor is running on a server, you can install virt-manager on your desktop and connect to the server via ssh:

$ sudo apt install virt-manager   # on your desktop

Set your LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI environment variable if you are using a non default path.

At this point, verify you are able to create new guests with virt-manager and be able to manage the guests with virsh.

Linux kernel image permissions on Ubuntu

Linux images are not readable by regular users on Ubuntu distributions. This breaks the ability of libguestfs to modify guest images unless running as root.

Fix the kernel image permissions with the dpkg-statoverride command:

$ sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0644 /boot/vmlinuz-$(uname -r)

To fix all of the installed images:

$ for i in /boot/vmlinuz-*; do sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0644 $i; done

To fix the permissions automatically with each new kernel version, create the file /etc/kernel/postinst.d/statoverride script. Be sure the statoverride script is executable:

#!/bin/sh
version="$1"
[ -z "${version}" ] && exit 0
dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0644 /boot/vmlinuz-${version}

For more information see Ubuntu bug 759725.

Installing virt-up

virt-up must be installed on the system running the KVM virtualization since it uses the libguestfs tools to prepare the virtual machine image files.

Install Python pip:

# apt install python3-pip

Install virt-up with Python pip. This can be installed as root for all users, or installed with pip as a regular user. If installed as a regular user, be sure $HOME/.local/bin is included in your $PATH:

$ pip3 install virt-up

Create virt-up setting and template files. The path of the configuration files can be found by running:

$ virt-up show paths | grep CONFIG

The per-user configuration files are written to the directory ~/.config/virt-up/. Set the VIRTUP_CONFIG_HOME environment variable to select an alternate location.

Run virt-up show templates to see the available template names.

Run virt-up create <name> --template <name> to create a virtual machine.