Re: [libvirt-users] Access to virtualization on a multi-user system
Just following up for future reference,
sbaugh(a)catern.com writes:
Hi libvirt-users,
I find myself wanting to do something that seems like it must have some
obvious solution: I have multiple users (let's just assume local Unix
accounts) on a Linux system, and I want them all to have access to
KVM-accelerated virtualization. But, I don't want them to be able to
meddle with each other's virtual machines. Is there a solution to this
problem?
Methods of attack that have occured to me:
- Use PolicyKit to only allow a user to access qemu:///system VMs that
are somehow marked as owned by that user
- Run multiple libvirt qemu:///system daemons and restrict access to
each on a per-user basis
- Allow qemu:///session VMs to actually be KVM-accelerated (this seems
like the best way to do it, but I have no idea if that's even
possible)
This way worked well! If /dev/kvm is accessible to your user (perhaps
through being world-writable), qemu can be KVM-accelerated without
privileges, and libvirt uses this automatically. Likewise,
qemu-bridge-helper[0] allows access to bridged networking without
privileges, and libvirt uses it automatically when it can. So now I have
a working setup for multiple users to have production-quality virtual
machines using qemu:///session, which has many benefits. (For one, you
can limit user virtual machines with ulimits!)
I'll probably write a blog post about this once I have explored it more.
[0] http://wiki.qemu.org/Features-Done/HelperNetworking
Again, the third seems like the best way, but I'm not sure of how
to
allow such VMs to be KVM-accelerated, and not sure if it's possible for
them to use anything other than usermode networking.
Hopefully I'm missing some obvious way to do it!
Thanks for any assistance!