Libvirt group neccessary?

Patrick · September 29, 2014, 3:38pm

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

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


      
          ## https://phabricator.whonix.org/T377
          ## Debian has no update-grub trigger yet:
          ## https://bugs.debian.org/481542
          if command -v update-grub >/dev/null 2>&1; then
             update-grub || \
                echo "$DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE $DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_NAME ERROR: Running \
          'update-grub' failed with exit code $?. $DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE is most \
          likely only the trigger, not the cause. Unless you know this is not an issue, \
          you should fix running 'update-grub', otherwise your system might no longer \
          boot." >&2
          fi
          
          
case "$1" in
             configure)
                true "INFO: Configuring $DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE..."
          
          
      adduser --home /run/tunnel --no-create-home --quiet --system --group --shell /bin/false "tunnel" || true
          
          
      true "INFO: End configuring $DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE."
          
          
      ;;

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 · September 29, 2014, 4:22pm

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 · October 1, 2014, 9:26pm

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: