libvirt: QEMU command-line passthrough
Description: libvirt, virtualization, virtualization API

# QEMU command-line passthrough

Libvirt aims to provide explicit modelling of virtualization features in the domain XML document schema. QEMU has a very broad range of features and not all of these can be mapped to elements in the domain XML. Libvirt would like to reduce the gap to QEMU, however, with finite resources there will always be cases which aren't covered by the domain XML schema.

## XML document additions

To deal with the problem, libvirt introduced support for command-line passthrough of QEMU arguments. This is achieved by supporting a custom XML namespace, under which some QEMU driver specific elements are defined.

The canonical place to declare the namespace is on the top level <domain> element. At the very end of the document, arbitrary command-line arguments can now be added, using the namespace prefix qemu:

    <domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
      <name>QEMUGuest1</name>
      <uuid>c7a5fdbd-edaf-9455-926a-d65c16db1809</uuid>
      ...
      <qemu:commandline>
        <qemu:arg value='-newarg'/>
        <qemu:arg value='parameter'/>
        <qemu:env name='ID' value='wibble'/>
        <qemu:env name='BAR'/>
      </qemu:commandline>
    </domain>

Note that when an argument takes a value eg -newarg parameter, the argument and the value must be passed as separate <qemu:arg> entries.

Instead of declaring the XML namespace on the top level <domain> it is also possible to declare it at time of use, which is more convenient for humans writing the XML documents manually. So the following example is functionally identical:

    <domain type='kvm'>
      <name>QEMUGuest1</name>
      <uuid>c7a5fdbd-edaf-9455-926a-d65c16db1809</uuid>
      ...
      <commandline xmlns="http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0">
        <arg value='-newarg'/>
        <arg value='parameter'/>
        <env name='ID' value='wibble'/>
        <env name='BAR'/>
      </commandline>
    </domain>

Note that when querying the XML from libvirt, it will have been translated into the canonical syntax once more with the namespace on the top level element.

## Security confinement / sandboxing

When libvirt launches a QEMU process it makes use of a number of security technologies to confine QEMU and thus protect the host from malicious VM breakouts.

When configuring security protection, however, libvirt generally needs to know exactly which host resources the VM is permitted to access. It gets this information from the domain XML document. This only works for elements in the regular schema, the arguments used with command-line passthrough are completely opaque to libvirt.

As a result, if command-line passthrough is used to expose a file on the host to QEMU, the security protections will activate and either kill QEMU or deny it access.

There are two strategies for dealing with this problem, either figure out what steps are needed to grant QEMU access to the device, or disable the security protections. The former is harder, but more secure, while the latter is simple.

### Granting access per VM

- SELinux - the file on the host needs an SELinux label that will grant access to QEMU's svirt_t policy.

  - Read-only access - use the virt_content_t label

  - Shared, write access - use the svirt_image_t:s0 label (ie no Multi- Category Security (MCS) value appended)

  - Exclusive, write access - use the svirt_image_t:s0:MCS label for the VM. The MCS is auto-generatd at boot time, so this may require re-configuring the VM to have a fixed MCS label

- Discretionary Access Control (DAC) - the file on the host needs to be readable/writable to the qemu user or qemu group. This can be done by changing the file ownership to qemu, or relaxing the permissions to allow world read, or adding file ACLs to allow access to qemu.

- Namespaces - a private mount namespace is used for QEMU by default which populates a new /dev with only the device nodes needed by QEMU. There is no way to augment the set of device nodes ahead of time.

- Seccomp - libvirt launches QEMU with its built-in seccomp policy enabled with obsolete=deny, elevateprivileges=deny, spawn=deny and resourcecontrol=deny settings active. There is no way to change this policy on a per VM basis.

- Cgroups - a custom cgroup is created per VM and this will either use the devices controller or an BPF rule to define an access control list for the set of device nodes. There is no way to change this policy on a per VM basis.

### Disabling security protection per VM

Some of the security protections can be disabled per-VM:

- SELinux - in the domain XML the <seclabel> model can be changed to none instead of selinux, which will make the VM run unconfined.

- DAC - in the domain XML an <seclabel> element with the dac model can be added, configured with a user / group account of root to make QEMU run with full privileges.

- Namespaces - there is no way to disable this per VM.

- Seccomp - there is no way to disable this per VM.

- Cgroups - there is no way to disable this per VM.

### Disabling security protection host-wide

As a last resort it is possible to disable security protection host wide which will affect all virtual machines. These settings are all made in /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf

- SELinux - set security_default_confined = 0 to make QEMU run unconfined by default, while still allowing explicit opt-in to SELinux for VMs.

- DAC - set user = root and group = root to make QEMU run as the root account.

- SELinux, DAC - set security_driver = [] to entirely disable both the SELinux and DAC security drivers.

- Namespaces - set namespaces = [] to disable use of the mount namespaces, causing QEMU to see the normal fully popualated dev.

- Seccomp - set seccomp_sandbox = 0 to disable use of the Seccomp sandboxing in QEMU.

- Cgroups - set cgroup_device_acl to include the desired device node, or cgroup_controllers = [...] to exclude the devices controller.

### Private mount namespace

As mentioned above, libvirt launches each QEMU process in its own mount namespace. It's recommended that all mount points are set up prior starting any guest. For cases when that can't be assured, mount points in the namespace are marked as slave so that mount events happening in the parent namespace are propagated into this child namespace. But this may require an additional step: mounts in the parent namespace need to be marked as shared (if the distribution doesn't do that by default). This can be achieved by running the following command before any guest is started:

    # mount --make-rshared /