Dec 29, 2025

On the third day of Christmas I managed to migrate from Virtualbox to libvirt. I learned about virtiofs - a way to share directories with libvirt VMs, similar to shared folders of VirtualBox, but with manual mounting on the guest side. I tried Cockpit and Cockpit-machines, which is a WebUI to libvirt, but it didn’t provide enough functionality (which I thought is extremely basic). I learned some obscure factoids about cloud-init, but still very confused. It’s such a weird combination of convenience and complexity. I landed on vagrant-libvirt provider, and made just a few changes to my Vagrantfile to adjust.

I wish I could remove Vagrant from my setup, but that would mean reimplementing the following steps, that I’m not too keen on:

1. SSH key provisioning.

2. Network configuration with static IP address for the guest and port forwarding.

3. Mounting the virtiofs mounts.

After all this good work, I looked at my GitHub repo with a lonely 1 star, and “unpublished” it. It’s a fun thing to hack around, but a hard thing to share with other people. So far, I learned that most people are pretty secretive about their home media library setup, and not interested in cooperating or consolidating.