Ubuntu's libvirt is compiled with VirtualBox driver disabled by default

[Adam Drew]

libvirt is compiled with VirtualBox support turned off by default in Ubuntu. I grabbed the source with apt-get source libvirt and:

adam@adam-laptop:~/libvirt-0.8.3$ pwd
/home/adam/libvirt-0.8.3
adam@adam-laptop:~/libvirt-0.8.3$ grep vbox debian/rules
 --without-vbox \

Because of this the only way to use libvirt and virsh with VirtualBox is to roll your own libvirt. Libvirt has had support for VirtualBox for a long time. It would probably good to remove --without-vbox from the package configuration.

[Mathias Gug (mathiaz)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. This is probably very difficult to do due to the fact that Virtual Box is in universe and libvirt is in main. All packages in main need to have their dependencies in main as well.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the report. As Mathias said, this would necessitate moving some of virtualbox into main, as a build-depends. That's not something we plan on doing in Ubuntu. Sorry.

[Alessandro Tanasi (jekil)]

This is really a pain for users to recompile libvirt package, why not put into universe a libvirt package compiled with virtualbox support?
Putting this into won't fix isn't a solution, it's just avoid to find a solution. It's can be done technologically, so why not try to find a solution? Libvirt has the aim to integrate different virtualization technologies, but you ship by default a package without support to main virtualization technologies around the world (KVM which is supported, vbox, vmware)?

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

You can certainly compile a libvirt package in your ppa with support for vbox, which others would be able to install without having to recompile themselves.

[Bruno Medeiros (brunojcm)]

Couldn't virtualbox be a optional dependency?

[Jean-Baptiste Rouault (jbrouault)]

VirtualBox isn't needed anymore to be able to build the libvirt driver, see this debian bug : http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=663589

VirtualBox is only a runtime dependency when one wants to use the "vbox:///session" libvirt URI, like the VMware driver which is enabled by default on the Ubuntu package.

[Laurent Dinclaux (dreadlox)]

Is it fixed or needs to be re-open ?

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Quoting Laurent Dinclaux (<email address hidden>):
> Is it fixed or needs to be re-open ?

virtualbox is still not in main, so libvirt still cannot
link against it.

[Jean-Baptiste Rouault (jbrouault)]

It looks like bug #1103721 was a duplicate of this bug, so this has been fixed in libvirt-1.0.1-0ubuntu2