Virtualization Archive (virt-ark)

The virtualization archive is a set of scripts to provide builds of old / outdated / ancient / obsolete versions of libvirt and QEMU, to current Fedora releases. These are NOT intended for people to actually use in production on Fedora, instead they are a way to test appliction interoperability with versions that may be present in other older OS distros.

For example, if Fedora has QEMU 2.10.0, but you want to test that a change to libvirt still works correctly with QEMU 1.5.3, the virt-ark will help you. Or if Fedora has libvirt 4.0.0, but you want to test that a change to virt-manager still works with libvirt 2.0.0, the virt-ark will help you.

Currently the ark is able to provide builds of

• Libvirt, versions from 1.2.0 onwards
• QEMU, versions from 1.4.0 onwards

The RPMs are named "$APP-ark-$VERSION", eg "libvirt-ark-1_2_20". Note the version is part of the RPM name, as well as being in the RPM version. This allows multiple versions to be easily installed in parallel

Installation Instructions

Each package version installs into /opt/$APP/$VERSION, eg /opt/libvirt/1.2.0 or /opt/qemu/2.4.0.

To launch libvirtd

$ sudo /opt/libvirt/1.2.20/sbin/libvirtd

These builds store all their configuration in /opt/libvirt/$VERSION/etc/libvirt, so will not conflict with the main Fedora installed libvirt. As a result though, you need to use the corresponding virsh binary to connect

$ /opt/libvirt/1.2.20/bin/virsh

To test building another app against this version set some environment variables

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/libvirt/1.2.20/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/libvirt/1.2.20/lib

For libvirtd to pick up a QEMU ark version, it must appear in $PATH before the QEMU from /usr eg

export PATH=/opt/qemu/2.0.0/bin:$PATH