On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 05:22:28PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > The current vshInit function in virsh tries some dodgy heuristics to see > if it should connect readonly or read/write to the hypervisor. > Unfortunately these heuristics fail, eg. when you have a root-owned > system-wide qemud, and a user trying to run virsh as non-root. > > This patch removes the heuristics and replaces them with a simple -r | > --readonly flag on the command line. If omitted, we try to connect > read/write, otherwise we try to connect readonly. I like this patch, but I don't think we can apply it in exactly the form it is now. There may well be people already using virsh in a non-root context with Xen, and this will break them requiring them to add a --readonly arg in. I think we should add the explicit --readonly flag patch attached, but also put in a simplified heuristic for the Xen non-root case. I'd think I'd add in a snippet of code looking like: if (ctl->uid != 0 && (ctl->name == NULL || !strcmp(ctl->name, "Xen")) ctl->readonly = TRUE; If people agree, I'll apply Rich's patch with this addition ?