libvirt - The virtualization API libvirt is a toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). Most optional dependencies are autodetected and having the required libs in place will build the respective features automatically. The group can be specified at build time like this: VIRTGROUP=somegroup ./libvirt.SlackBuild (default: users) You'll want to keep this in sync with what qemu uses (it also defaults to the "users" group). If you want to start the libvirt daemon at boot, add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local # Start libvirt: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt start fi and if you want it to stop at shutdown add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown # Stop libvirt: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt stop fi The enclosed rc.libvirt script will do a 'managedsave' on all running and paused guests when issuing 'rc.libvirt stop'. Please note that this saves the RAM of each guest to the host system's disk (by default under /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/save) - so make sure enough space is available. If you prefer to perform a full shutdown on all running guests instead, issue a 'rc.libvirt guests_shutdown' followed by 'rc.libvirt shutdown'. By default 'rc.libvirt stop' and 'rc.libvirt guests_shutdown' will wait a maximum of 5 minutes for all guests to shutdown, after which any guests still running will be destroyed. Adjust this to a suitable value for your system, as destroying a running guest carries a high risk of data loss! There is also a 'guests_reboot' for rebooting all running guests. Have a look at the commented part of rc.libvirt for some gotchas. netcat-openbsd is an optional dependency (needed if you want to connect from a remote host using virt-manager). Other optional dependencies include avahi, xen, audit, glusterfs, and numactl. As of the 4.5.0 version, you may have to remove any previously installed versions of libvirt before this will build.