Some time ago, _libvirt_ was refactored to use separate daemons and
sockets for each of its responsibilities, and the original "monolithic"
`libvirtd` was made obsolete. The Fedora packages have more recently
been adjusted to favor this new approach, and now default to omitting
the monolithic daemon entirely (when `install_weak_deps` is disabled).
One interesting packaging snafu, though, is that without the weak
dependencies, there is _no_ way for clients to connect by default.
Clients run `which virt-ssh-helper` to see if it is installed, which it
is, but `which` is not. They then fall back to running `nc`, which is
_also_ not installed. So even though the tools they actually need are
present, their logic for detecting this is broken. As such, we need to
explicitly install `which` to satisfy them.
At some point, the _qemu-kvm_ package became a meta-package that
installs _everything_ QEMU-related. All drivers, backends, frontends,
etc. get pulled in, which results in a huge amount of wasted space.
Recently, the VM hosts started getting alerts about their `/` filesystem
getting too full, which is how I discovered this.
We can dramatically reduce the disk space footprint by installing only
the "core" package and the drivers we need for our servers.
After making and applying this change, which marks the listed packages
as "leaf" installs, I then manually uninstalled the _qemu-kvm_ package.
This uninstalled everything else that is not specifically listed.
The *libvirt-daemon-driver-network* package provides support for
managing virtual networks with libvirt. It is necessary in order to use
managed networks in VM configuration, as opposed to directly specifying
VM network interfaces in their domain configuration.
Dustin