GenesiGenesiWiki
Virtualization

QEMU User Session

Run virtual machines as your own user, without system-level libvirt privileges.

The standard QEMU/KVM setup runs VMs through the system libvirt daemon (qemu:///system). There's also a user session (qemu:///session) that runs VMs entirely as your own user — no root, no adding yourself to the libvirt group, and each user's VMs are private to them.

It's a good fit for quick, disposable VMs; the trade-off is simpler, lower-performance user-mode networking by default.

Connect virt-manager to the user session

  1. Open Virtual Machine Manager.
  2. File → Add Connection…
  3. Set the hypervisor to QEMU/KVM user session and connect.

New VMs you create under that connection run as your user.

Networking

The system session gives VMs a real bridged/NAT network via libvirtd. The user session instead uses user-mode networking — historically SLIRP, and now passt/pasta, which is faster and needs no privileges:

sudo pacman -S passt

Outbound connections from the guest work out of the box; reaching a service on the guest from the host needs explicit port forwarding.

For port-forwarding syntax and the full picture of session vs. system mode, see the Arch Wiki: libvirt and the CachyOS QEMU user session guide.

QEMU / KVM

Running virtual machines on Genesi OS with QEMU/KVM and virt-manager.

EGL Headless

GPU-accelerated display for a VM with no virtual monitor attached.

On this page

Connect virt-manager to the user sessionNetworking