On Fri, Jun 02, 2023 at 08:41:44AM +0000, Victor Sudakov wrote:
Interestingly, libvirt claims to support bhyve, I just never felt a need for such sophisticated tools to run just several VMs.
Yes, it sounds like you should just ignore libvirt entirely and just install qemu-system-x86 (and not qemu-system-gui). That's a minimal system with no gui, you just run qemu from the command line to start VMs. If you run with --enable-kvm or --machine accel=kvm, then you're using kvm (assuming the kernel module is loaded).
That said, there's a huge convenience factor for libvirt. You may end up with libraries you'll never use on the server, but so what? You can install virt-manager on a client system and manage with a gui that uses ssh in the background, or use virsh on the server. If you find yourself needing to do something infrequently, it's much easier to discover it in the virt-manager gui than it is to dig through docs on how to do it from the qemu command line. (This is, of course, the usual tradeoff between text and graphical interfaces.) It's also easier to use standard/documented solutions for startup, config, storage, etc, than it is to remember what bespoke solution you came up with several years ago when something breaks, even if all the abstraction layers of libvirt are "less efficient".