If libvirt is built in client only mode, the libvirtd/virtqemud/etc daemons won't exist. If the client is told to connect to a local hypervisor, it'll see the socket doesn't exist, try to spawn the daemon and then re-try connecting to the socket for a few seconds. Ultimately this will fail because the daemon doesn't exist and the user gets an error message error: Failed to connect socket to '/run/user/1000/libvirt/virtqemud-sock': No such file or directory technically this is accurate, but it doesn't help identify the root cause. With this change it will now report error: binary 'virtqemud' does not exist in $PATH: No such file or directory and will skip all the socket connect retries Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; --- Last time it was suggested that virCommandGetBinaryPath could be extended to always check whether the binary exists. I started doing that and realized it was a bad idea as this method runs in a context which might not have permission to access to the binary we are about to run, as we've not changed user/group ID yet. So I'm re-posting this targetted fix, with format string fixup. src/rpc/virnetsocket.c | 16 +++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/rpc/virnetsocket.c b/src/rpc/virnetsocket.c index b58f7a6b8f..0215c99c73 100644 --- a/src/rpc/virnetsocket.c +++ b/src/rpc/virnetsocket.c @@ -123,9 +123,19 @@ VIR_ONCE_GLOBAL_INIT(virNetSocket); #ifndef WIN32 static int virNetSocketForkDaemon(const char *binary) { - g_autoptr(virCommand) cmd = virCommandNewArgList(binary, - "--timeout=120", - NULL); + g_autofree char *binarypath = virFindFileInPath(binary); + g_autoptr(virCommand) cmd = NULL; + + if (!binarypath) { + virReportSystemError(ENOENT, + _("binary '%1$s' does not exist in $PATH"), + binary); + return -1; + } + + cmd = virCommandNewArgList(binarypath, + "--timeout=120", + NULL); virCommandAddEnvPassCommon(cmd); virCommandAddEnvPass(cmd, "XDG_CACHE_HOME"); -- 2.41.0