[libvirt-users] Running virConnectGetCapabilities / virsh capabilities without a daemon or KVM

For virt-p2v we want to get the host CPU model, topology etc, and the best way we found to do that was to pull it from libvirt capabilities[1]. Since libvirt is already parsing the host CPU information, and because /proc/cpuinfo is such a stupid format to parse, this is very convenient. Unfortunately it doesn't work unless libvirtd _and_ KVM are both installed. Without libvirtd installed: # virsh capabilities error: failed to connect to the hypervisor error: Failed to connect socket to '/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock': No such file or directory With libvirt-daemon installed, but not QEMU: # virsh capabilities error: failed to connect to the hypervisor error: no connection driver available for <null> I feel I should be able to fiddle with the connection URI in some way to make this possible, at least in the second case. However there's not a concept of "no hypervisor", and I couldn't find any other way to make it work. Using "test:///default" seems tempting, but it substitutes some imaginary host (i686) so that's no good. Installing KVM isn't really an option for us since we are trying to build a minimal bootable ISO. Just installing qemu-system-x86_64 pulls in half the world. (Even installing libvirtd is difficult, and we'd prefer to avoid it). Any ideas? Rich. [1] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/963d6c3be7cd91c0373f67cfd... -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW