Virt Image

Containerfile for building a virt-manager image.

This image is based on top of vanillaos/pico and offers a virt installation.

Build

Requirements

• Vib
• Podman or Docker

Build the image

vib build recipe.yml
podman image build -t vanillaos/virt .

Run

Requirements

• Podman or Docker
• Distrobox

Usage

The container needs to be rootfull.

distrobox create --root --init --unshare-groups --unshare-ipc --unshare-netns --unshare-process -i ghcr.io/vanilla-os/virt:main -n virt # replace with your local image if you built it
distrobox enter --root virt

Then start virt-manager:

virt-manager

Troubleshooting

Unathorized when sharing a USB device

This should not happen, the image has a dedicated Polkit policy for this. If you encounter this issue, please open an issue.

Cannot connect to a remote libvirt daemon over SSH

Please, refer to this from the Distrobox documentation.

Default network unreachable

If the default network is unreachable, try to start it manually:

sudo virsh net-start default
virsh net-autostart default

if the above command fails due to missing network, try loading it from the XML:

sudo virsh net-define /usr/share/libvirt/networks/default.xml
sudo virsh net-start default
virsh net-autostart default

Use of Generative AI

Maintainers may use generative AI tools as assistants while working on virt-image. Non-trivial assisted commits disclose the tool, model, and scope of the work.

AI tools may assist with code comments, documentation, repetitive code, and issue triage. Maintainers make project decisions and review every assisted change before it is merged.

Use these trailers for non-trivial assisted commits:

Assisted-by: <tool>:<model-version>
AI-Scope: <what the tool generated and the prompt or a short prompt summary>

Single-line completions, renames, and formatting changes do not need trailers.

Coding agents must also follow AGENTS.md before changing files, creating commits, or opening pull requests.