Types of libvirt Driver Daemons

Oracle Linux 10 provides functionality for two different types of libvirt driver daemons: Modular and Monolithic. The granularity in which you can configure individual virtualization drivers depends on which libvirt daemon you use. For example:

  • Modular libvirt - Oracle Linux 10 Fresh Install

    Modular libvirt provides a specific daemon for each hypervisor driver. These include:

    • virtqemud: is the QEMU management daemon, for running virtual machines on KVM.
    • virtnetworkd: is the virtual network management daemon.
    • virtnodedevd: is the host physical device management daemon.
    • virtnwfilterd: is the host firewall management daemon.
    • virtsecretd: is the host secret management daemon.
    • virtstoraged: is the host storage management daemon.
    • virtinterfaced: is the host Network Interface Card (NIC) management daemon.
    • virtproxyd is a virtualization proxy daemon that lets remote clients to securely access the libvirt APIs.

    The name of the daemon reflects the name of the host driver, for example: virt [DRIVER]d. Each driver daemon has a separate configuration file that resides in libvirt directory. For example, the configuration file path for QEMU management driver daemon is /etc/libvirt/virtqemud.conf.

    Modular driver daemons provide better options for fine-tuning and managing the libvirt system resources. When you perform a fresh install of Oracle Linux 10, the libvirt modular virtualization driver daemons are configured by default.

    Note:

    When the virt$[DRIVER]d daemon is managed by systemd other features are also available, most notably socket activation. For more information about the use of modular sockets and systemd integration, see https://libvirt.org/daemons.html#modular-sockets.

  • Monolithic libvirt - Update from Oracle Linux 8

    By default, the traditional monolithic daemon, known as libvirtd is configured when you update from Oracle Linux 8 to Oracle Linux 10. The libvirtd daemon controls a wide variety of virtualization drivers by using a single configuration file (/etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf). In some instances, system resources might be used inefficiently when using the libvirtd centralized configuration. Therefore, we recommend that Oracle Linux 10 users switch to the modular libvirt driver daemons. For instructions, see https://libvirt.org/daemons.html#switching-to-modular-daemons

For general information about the usage of libvirt daemons, see https://libvirt.org/daemons.html.