Libvirt group neccessary?

Patrick · November 15, 2015, 7:43pm

I was working on automatically adding groups to user “user” for better usability as we talked about a while ago.

Whonix/usability-misc/blob/master/debian/usability-misc.postinst#L40


      else
         ## setting password of user $user_account to changeme
         ##
         ## How this password was created:
         ## sudo apt-get install whois
         ## mkpasswd
         ## changeme
         ## Resulted in: aTayYxVyw5kDo
         password="aTayYxVyw5kDo"
      fi
      useradd --create-home --password "$password" --user-group --shell /bin/bash "$user_account" || true
   fi
done


if command -v qubesdb-read >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
   true
else
   ## {{ Taken from /var/lib/dpkg/info/qemu-system-common.postinst.
   # Add the kvm group unless it's already there
   if ! getent group kvm >/dev/null; then
      addgroup --quiet --system kvm || true

Debian maintainer scripts are located in /var/lib/dpkg/info/… I saw code for adding the group “kvm” in /var/lib/dpkg/info/qemu-system-common.postinst. But no code to add the group “libvirt”. Only code to delete group “libvirt” in /var/lib/dpkg/info/libvirt-bin.postrm. It also deletes group “libvirt-qemu”. So I am wondering wheter the last two groups “libvirt” and “libvirt-qemu” have been deprecated? If that was the case, there would be no need re-create them in usability-misc.postinst.

HulaHoop · November 15, 2015, 7:43pm

According to Debian’s documentation that has been updated pretty recently this year, 2 groups are needed for KVM, they are libvirt and kvm.

https://wiki.debian.org/KVM

So yes, it seems to need the libvirt group too. This makes sense becuase libvirt is a separate component than kvm, and its a virtualization abstraction layer that supports many different programs.

Patrick · November 15, 2015, 7:43pm

Anyone can edit Debian wiki. It’s not a primary, authoritative source. That edit was non-malicious and probably well intentioned. Yet, I don’t know if someone added that information who knows this is required or just added what was necessary in earlier versions.

Anyhow. In this specific case the libvirt group is documented in /usr/share/doc/libvirt-bin/README.Debian. Also documents the other groups, we don’t have to add. Also found how its created in the “apt-get source libvirt-bin” in debian/libvirt-bin.postinst. For some reason that file is not on my local hdd but the libvirt debian source.

This is now implemented: