Gfilui

I want to create a storage pool for virt-manager's qcow2 images in my home directory but I get a strange error:

Error creating pool: Could not define storage pool: XML error: name /home/matthias/virtual-guests/virt-manager cannot contain '/'

questions

• Is it even possible to have the storage pool in my home directory?


• Do I need special permissions for virt-manager to access the directory?

full error traceback


Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 89, in cb_wrapper
callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/createpool.py", line 442, in _async_pool_create
poolobj = self._pool.install(create=True, meter=meter, build=build)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtinst/storage.py", line 531, in install
raise RuntimeError(_("Could not define storage pool: %s") % str(e))
RuntimeErError creating pool: Could not define storage poror: Could not define storage pool: XML error: name /home/matthias/virtual-guests/virt-manager cannot contain '/'


You can create pools, but there are a few things to consider.

1. The "name" really has to be without a set of special characters, like '/'. If you want to create a /tmp/test pool you might name it "test" (on step 1 of 2) and give it the path "/tmp/test" (on step 2 of 2) and it will work.




2. apparmor will stop you if you go too uncommon
   There is a limited set of paths that are allowed by default, if you go
   out of these at some point virt-aa-helper will no more able to access the files. But that would be needed so that it can allow the access for the per-guest custom profile. See the existing rules in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.libvirt.virt-aa-helper and add custom ones via /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.lib.libvirt.virt-aa-helper
   See /etc/apparmor.d/local/README for more on this.




3. Some pool types are yet unable to be handled by apparmor. The default pool type of virt-manager will be "dir" and that will be fine. But there are more advanced types like "lvm groups", for those types apparmor rules can not be created for the guest on the fly (see bug on this), in these cases you'll need to allow the extra paths you need via changing /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu.