On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 07:55:20PM -0700, Yushu Yao wrote: > Thanks Atsushi and Stefan, > > It seems that libvirtd has to run with root, is this true? Yes, because it has todo lots of privileged jobs, such as starting QEMU with permissiong to use /dev/kvm, accessing disks and logical volumes in /dev, creating TAP devices, creating bridge devices, and much more. That said, if you were to chmod/chown all the devices in question, you could run libvirtd unprivileged - it requires alot of setup ahead of time though. > But why does libvirtd need to run for QEMU? If it's for start/stop/pause vm, > is Qemu's command line tool not enough? Libvirt does much more than just starting/stopping QEMU. It interacts with its monitor console to control many aspects of it at runtime. It also tracks state of running VMs to detect shutdown & cleanup, and also manages storage, and networking state. Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- Libvir-list mailing list Libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list