Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 346151
Create a kvm user account and kvm group
Last modified: 2009-07-16 06:34:42 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8 Description of problem: Running kvm usually requires being root or using sudo. However, as suggested on the KVM FAQ http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/FAQ#head-69bc2ce5da2f8fc4f1248afefd7bae00fa2dc277 the /dev/kvm file can have the group kvm by creating a file $ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm.rules KERNEL=="kvm",MODE="0660",GROUP="kvm" Then, anyone in the kvm group can use kvm. This is similar to 245728, except this request for enhancement is asking for a group instead of allowing any user to use kvm. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run qemu-kvm as a regular user. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional info:
Problem still exists in f8.
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Still in f9
Is there any reason why this group isn't created by default? it sounds like a good idea.
FYI, our intention is to make the device world accessible by defualt for future Fedora releases https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497341 I think it is still reasonable to also have a 'kvm' group for the /dev/kvm device, so we can leave this BZ open too
Adding that the RPM should also create a 'kvm' user account, so that libvirt's qemu:///system driver can run the QEMU / KVM processes as a system account that isn't root.
See also: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtPrivileges
The setup RPM already has a kvm group. In qemu-0.10.50-10.kvm87.fc12 we now create that if it does not already exist, to cope with upgrades from older Fedora. THe /dev/kvm device is also set to have 'kvm' group ownership