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OpenCharly

qemu-guest-agent

Recipe card from the charly-distros plugin (Images — the deployable catalog).

qemu-guest-agent – QEMU guest agent

Section titled “qemu-guest-agent – QEMU guest agent”

Candy Properties

Section titled “Candy Properties”
Property Value
Install files charly.yml

Packages

Section titled “Packages”
  • qemu-guest-agent – QEMU guest agent daemon. The package name is identical on Arch/CachyOS (pac) and Fedora (rpm), so the top-level package: covers both — this is a cross-distro candy, not RPM-only.

Full functionality (all RPCs + fsfreeze)

Section titled “Full functionality (all RPCs + fsfreeze)”

The candy exposes the complete guest-agent surface — guest-exec, guest-file-*, guest-fsfreeze-*, guest-set-*. The package default blocks no RPCs; the candy’s /etc/qemu/qemu-ga.conf makes that explicit and turns on the fsfreeze hook (the one capability not active by default), so the host can take application-consistent snapshots. The hook is a standard dispatcher (/etc/qemu/fsfreeze-hook) that runs every executable in /etc/qemu/fsfreeze-hook.d/ with freeze/thaw; drop per-app scripts there.

The candy also enables the qemu-guest-agent.service (system scope) and contributes the virtio-serial channel (below). On a kind: vm entity the channel is usually declared structurally instead — channels: [{type: unix, name: org.qemu.guest_agent.0}] (see /charly-internals:libvirt-renderer).

Usage

Section titled “Usage”
# charly.yml -- add to a bootc image's layer list
my-vm-image:
  bootc: true
  candy:
    - qemu-guest-agent
# or applied to a VM guest at deploy time:
#   charly bundle add vm:<name> qemu-guest-agent

Used In Boxes

Section titled “Used In Boxes”

Composed into bootc images directly, or applied to a VM guest at deploy time (charly bundle add vm:<name> qemu-guest-agent).

virtio-serial channel (libvirt XML contribution)

Section titled “virtio-serial channel (libvirt XML contribution)”

The candy contributes a raw libvirt XML snippet that the libvirt renderer places in the VM’s <devices> section:

<channel type='unix'>
  <target type='virtio' name='org.qemu.guest_agent.0'/>
</channel>

Emitted in charly.yml as:

libvirt:
  snippets:
    - "<channel type='unix'><target type='virtio' name='org.qemu.guest_agent.0'/></channel>"

This is the / classification case: isDeviceElement flags it as device-scoped, so the renderer injects it inside <devices> rather than before </domain>. See /charly-internals:libvirt-renderer for the injection pipeline and /charly-vm:vm for the QEMU-user-net caveat (the agent shows as enabled/inactive under charly’s QEMU backend; libvirt backend activates it).

Section titled “Related Candies”

When to Use This Skill

Section titled “When to Use This Skill”

Use when the user asks about:

  • QEMU guest agent installation
  • Host-guest communication in VMs
  • Libvirt virtio channel configuration
  • The org.qemu.guest_agent.0 channel
Section titled “Related”