Virt-manager failing to launch.

zmaint

I have not done Friday's updates yet, but I don't see anything in them that I think would affect it. I did update on Wednesday, and virt-manager was working prior to that. It launches fine, but does not offer the elevated privileges (password) pop up box. As such, it doesn't load (display) any VM's. Error is below.

Unable to connect to libvirt qemu:///system.

authentication unavailable: no polkit agent available to authenticate action 'org.libvirt.unix.manage'

Libvirt URI is: qemu:///system

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/connection.py", line 923, in do_open
self.backend.open(cb, data)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtinst/connection.py", line 153, in open
conn = libvirt.openAuth(self._open_uri,
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/libvirt.py", line 147, in openAuth
raise libvirtError('virConnectOpenAuth() failed')
libvirt.libvirtError: authentication unavailable: no polkit agent available to authenticate action 'org.libvirt.unix.manage'

Virt-manager does run fine when launched directly from terminal with sudo.

ReillyBrogan

If you're on Plasma then you're seeing the now infamous polkit bug. You can search around on this forum but the gist of it is that polkit dialogs (IE the thing that takes your authentication when you try to connect with virt-manager) are currently broken due to the update to Plasma 5.25 and some interaction with our Polkit fork. To resolve this we're currently working on switching to upstream Polkit (which doesn't have the issue), but this is going to require some heavy testing to make sure it doesn't break other things. No ETA on this yet, but hopefully it doesn't take more than a sync cycle or two.

For now you should be able to launch virt-manager from the command line with sudo virt-manager, which I know is definitely not ideal but it should work for the moment. You should also be able to add yourself to the libvirt group (make sure to log out and back in after this) which will allow you to bypass the Polkit dialog.

zmaint

ReillyBrogan Thank you. I've got no issues launching from command line and it does work from there fine. Appreciate the update!