Libvir the virtualization API

Table of Contents:

• License(s)
• Installation
• Compilation
• Developer corner

License(s)

1. Licensing Terms for libvir

   libvir is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, see the file COPYING.LIB in the distribution for the precise wording. The only library that libvir depends upon is the Xen store access library which is also licenced under the LGPL.

2. Can I embed libvir in a proprietary application ?

   Yes. The LGPL allows you to embed libvir into a proprietary application. It would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main development tree. It will decrease your maintainance costs anyway if you do so.

Installation

1. Where can I get libvir ?

   The original distribution comes from ftp://libvir.org/libvir/.

2. I can't install the libvir/libvir-devel RPM packages due to failed dependencies

   The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and rebuild it locally with

   rpm --rebuild libvir-xxx.src.rpm.

   If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one providing the shared libs and virsh, and the other one, the -devel package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build applications with libvir that you can install locally.

   One can also rebuild the RPMs from a tarball:

   rpmbuild -ta libdir-xxx.tar.gz

   Or from a configured tree with:

   make rpm

Compilation

1. What is the process to compile libvir ?

   As most UNIX libraries libvir follows the "standard":

   gunzip -c libvir-xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -

   cd libvir-xxxx

   ./configure --help

   to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper

   ./configure [possible options]

   make

   make install

   At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to update your list of installed shared libs.

2. What other libraries are needed to compile/install libvir ?

   Libvir requires libxenstore, which is usually provided by the xen packages as well as the public headers to compile against libxenstore.

3. I use the CVS version and there is no configure script

   The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles, like:

   ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared

Developer corner

1. Troubles compiling or linking programs using libvir

   To simplify the process of reusing the library, libvir comes with pkgconfig support, which can be used directly from autoconf support or via the pkg-config command line tool, like:

   pkg-config libvir --libs

Daniel Veillard