Hello Francesco, Francesco Poli (wintermute) [2019-11-08 23:59 +0100]: > I wanted to give the QEMU/KVM testbed a try. Hence I tried to create > a VM image by using autopkgtest-build-qemu. Its man page states: > > [...] > | Note that you need to call this as root. > [...] > > And indeed the command > > $ autopkgtest-build-qemu unstable ~/var/cache/autopkgtest/sid.img > > fails, when issued by a regular user, as it cannot even find parted > in the search PATH. > > I guess this is because of vmdb2, which requires superuser privileges. > But why?
Antonio already replied to this part. > Is there any hope to improve vmdb2 or to use another tool, in order > to create a KVM testbed without requiring superuser privileges? A much better approach to this would be what autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud does, and use a cloud image. Debian has these (https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/), we use them for e. g. Cockpit CI as well. There aren't any for testing, so you would need to start with stable and upgrade. Perhaps we can talk the cloud image maintainers into creating images for testing regularly. Then adjusting this to an autopkgtest-buildvm-debian-cloud script, or even generalizing/unifying the two, should not be too hard. Certainly much simpler than trying to teach vmdb2 to run as normal user. Martin
