While testing F36, I ran into a problem installing virtualization support on Fedora Server. Until now we installed qemu-kvm, libvirt, virt-install, and additionally cockpit-machines. That combo installs about 338 packages, at least 200 packages graphical desktop related (X11, wayland, gtk3, even poppler pdf renderer, see [1]). This breaks Fedora Servers fundamental headless core concept and installs lots of unusable and thus locally uncontrolled/unmaintained software. == In this respect, a correction is urgently needed. == === qemu-kvm === The cause of the problem is the use of package QEMU-kvm, which is aimed - hitherto unnoticed - at installation on a graphical desktop and therefore completely correctly assumes the appropriate packages. This in turn relies on the @virtualization group, which is the only public group supporting virtualization installation and is described accordingly in the Fedora documentation (without mentioning the graphical bias). In principle, the solution is quite simple. The qemu-kvm developers were wise enough to create a qemu-kvm-core group at the same time, which omits all graphical references and allows for an excellent installation on Fedora Server. === libvirt === Unfortunately, the maintainers of libvirt are far from this wisdom and insist that the libvirt package still relies on qemu-kvm, thus installing all the packages that QEMU-kvm-core omits again anyway. An analogous libvirt-core does not exist. Instead, Daniel Berrange refers to the list of individually available single packages, from which one (i.e. server WG) should please compile and test a suitable mix and watch the libvirt development steps to see if changes to the mix are required (see bug report by Martin Pitt [2]). == So we need to find a way to reliably determine a working set of libvirt packages for Fedora Server (or change the tool set). == Maybe we can find support in Debian/Ubuntu, whose libvirt maintainers have solved the problem, at least according to my first impression. === Group virtualization-headless === An initial approach to a solution could be the group ==@virtualization-headless==. This is a hidden group (see 'dnf group list -v hidden') that currently does pretty much the same as @virtualization, unfortunately. We could contact the owner and modify the group as required (or create a new group @virtualization-server). We could use that as a means to organize a suitable libvirt mix. === Cockpit-machines === As a further consequence, the cockpit-machines module is currently effectively unusable. It also has QEMU-kvm defined as a dependency. Even if we fix the libvirt problem with a suitable mix, cockpit-machines would currently undo this effort. Martin Pitt is on the way to fix it, see [3]. But we have to find a solution for F36. I’ll tag this issue for our next meeting. Any suggestions much appreciated. [1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/server@lists.fedoraproject.... [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2063670 [3] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpituous/pull/473