I'm aware that getting virt-manager/kvm/qemu has been extremely difficult in recent years - especially with the difference between stable (14.2) and current, and the slackbuild support over that ever-widening gap. BUT - that was then and this is now - AND now we have a stable and current being the same (yay !!!). So I checked out ponce's git builds and did a basic install of what seemed obvious - libvirt, qemu and virt-manager. And it don't work.

But I'm not sure the programs are at fault. This is most likely a PEBKAC issue. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much good documentation going around. Does anyone have a nice clear recipe on how to do this, right from the first installs off a clean Slackware install ?

I'll get back to you about it, ok? I'll be doing something similar the next few days, and I'll probably try to make a docs howto about it. I'll make it for 15.0 though.

I'll be making it on (ivy??) Intel Core i5 with the correct capabilities, with a custom kernel, and possibly copy the exact same thing with an official Kernel or one based on the official with necessary (??) added Kernel options (for the howto). Not been looking at the Kernel options for this yet, but I would guess the necessary ones are included in generic and huge. Please feel free to share some info about your hardware/kernel etc too.

Perhaps we can all help each others here, and make this the kvm/qemu/libvirt thread?

If at all possible, for the purpose of a howto, it would be nice if you could do it in Slackware 15.0 instead of current. Perhaps create a dualboot for the purpose.

Edit. Strike that about custom Kernel, I'll do it from the official before I get too deeply into LSM land.

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Slackware 15.0
5.15.19 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Feb 2 01:50:51 CST 2022 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3317U CPU @ 1.70GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

So, we're on generic. Checking generic config, it seems that we have all that is needed not only to get qemu-kvm running, but all components and extras working (virtio drivers etc).

We always check if virtualization is present/enabled:
Virtualization: VT-x

..and we're ready to go..

YESSIREEEEEE ....

This works. You are a true officer and a gentleman and I thank you.


Also @zeebra - I'm sure your guide will help too - there are indeed starter steps to confirm - in my case they were already satisfied. But for others they may not be.

Indeed. I'll do it anyways, and I hope you don't mind using this thread for the purpose

I indeed hope you do do it because though it clearly works for him, it works [the link he used], it does not for me. I have it no prob Slack 14.2 so I am clearly doing something wrong.

I will, and I got started, but I got a bit discouraged by the "ugly" dependencies, and with all of those it will clearly be longer (step-by-step) as well.
I'll see if I can't put together a "staged" installation, and also perhaps make the dependency stages available as slack-packages or something. But it takes a bit of time and experimentation to get that just right, although the pointer of truepatriot was extremely helpful.

Trust me, you do you and we will sit back and relax and wait.

I had nothing "important" on my Slack 14.2 except the 2 VM's so I wiped it and went 15 and baaaam, I am just having dependence breakdown. Again, I know it is me but "me" needs help.

So for now, back to 14.2.
Thank you my man.

I would also like to see a recipe that works from a clean install. As I said, using the order and builds suggested did work for me, but this was after I had tried myself first - and thus there was already some material and packages on my box. I also recall having to fix a group in a script, changing the name to "users". The slackbuild that suggested it would do that automatically seems to have missed that particular file - I think it was /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf. But again, it could have been me :-)

Also, as rc scripts are added (and rc.local needs to call them), a reboot is also required at some point. I'm not in a position to try this again from scratch. I only have this one laptop available and it's my work machine. I can't imagine that doing it a VM would be useful ... can you even run a VM inside another VM ?????

Well, that's what I'll do. Just trying to do it systematically and write it all down in the right order.

Anyways, both qemu and libvirt can be installed on Slackware 15 without further ado (but don't yet!). The main "problem" here is virt-manager which need some unsavory dependencies, and dependendencies of dependencies. Most of patriots list are those things. However, before you install qemu you have to consider to compile it with support for XYZ (./configure to have a look), but in particular spice.
Just a quick guess of that list, additional ones for qemu itself are libnfs, snappy, vde2, and virglrenderer, device-tree-compiler, usbredir, but I hate the idea of snappy, so I'll see if it's not possible to do without.

Ok, so I think I have the order of things more or less figured out for testing (the order), so long as nothing in stage2 has dependencies that we don't have it should be fine:

Edit. These stages are fine, and there is no particular order inside the stages. I do them alphabetical

Being a fair bit bit into the process and documenting it, that's not really surprising, considering just how many things that potentially can go wrong in that process. There are some quirky ways of doing things.

Sadly the documentation is already huge. I'm kind of wondering how I can make that clean and usable for a howto. I do hope that someone can use the documentation and put together a staged build. I'm not really much into building acceptable packages aside for my own use. But so far, being underway, I think the stages above should be fine in that order. But time will tell.

So far so good, but the document is getting big and it's messy. Might take some time to clean that up.

spice-protocol should be in stage 1, not stage 3 (obviously..)

Don't use these links or tags on gitlab if you want to build without trouble.
https://gitlab.com/spice/spice/-/tags/v0.15.0
https://gitlab.com/spice/spice-gtk/-/tags/v0.39

You can find the releases on the somewhat chaotic download page of:
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html