Re: [gentoo-user] Re: kernel linux-4.12.5-gentoo & virtualbox-modules-5.0.40

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 4:08 PM, R0b0t1 <r030t1@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 2:10 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
>> I do suggest using libvirt, and found that
>> app-emulation/virt-manager gives you a lot of the benefits of
>> something with a pretty GUI like Virtualbox, but it is 100% FOSS
>> underneath and you can run it all from the command line too.  It is
>> just a front-end to libvirt.  There are no issues with running these
>> VMs as services also, and I believe that you can connect to their
>> consoles at any time with virt-manager.
>>
>
> My only issue is that when I used libvirt I had to edit the produced
> configurations by hand, and the settings wouldn't always take. Certain
> hardware configurations were also hard to set up.
>

This is why I use virt-manager.  Granted, like most GUI tools there
are probably some settings you can only get at in the config files,
but it seems at least as capable as Virtualbox.  You can always
hand-edit configs but you probably won't bother.

> However, should everything work it is very nice, and can do things
> like start your VMs on boot and create tap devices on demand, etc.
>

And that is what I like about it.  Since virt-manager is just a GUI on
top of libvirt you can set up VMs and edit them with the GUI, but
still do all this kind of stuff from the command line when you want
to, or from a service/etc.

And if you use systemd I'm pretty sure there are units for all of that
stuff, and it interacts with machinectl, but that is just an
integration and you don't need systemd to use libvirt.  Systemd itself
is mostly just a front-end to libvirt when doing this stuff, and that
is the power behind the concept - one API for a bunch of tools.

-- 
Rich