virt-what - Man Page

virt-what [options]

virt-what is a shell script which can be used to detect if the program is running in a virtual machine.

The program prints out a list of "facts" about the virtual machine, derived from heuristics.  One fact is printed per line.

If nothing is printed and the script exits with code 0 (no error), then it can mean either that the program is running on bare-metal or the program is running inside a type of virtual machine which we don't know about or cannot detect.

alibaba_cloud

alibaba_cloud-ebm

This is a cloud computing service based on Alibaba Cloud.

Status: contributed by Weisson.

aws

Amazon Web Services.

Note that virt-what will print this fact for baremetal AWS instances, which you might not consider to be true virtualization.  In this case other facts (eg. kvm or xen) would not be present.

Status: contributed by Qi Guo, Vitaly Kuznetsov, confirmed by RWMJ.

bhyve

This is a bhyve (FreeBSD hypervisor) guest.

Status: contributed by Leonardo Brondani Schenkel.

crio

The guest is running in a CRI-O container.

Status: suggested by Alessandro Taufer, confirmed by RWMJ & Xiaodai Wang

docker

This is a Docker container.

Status: confirmed by Charles Nguyen

google_cloud

This is running on Google Cloud Platform / Google Compute Engine.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

hyperv

This is Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

ibm_power-kvm

This is an IBM POWER KVM guest.

Status: contributed by Adrian Likins.

ibm_power-lpar_shared

ibm_power-lpar_dedicated

This is an IBM POWER LPAR (hardware partition) in either shared or dedicated mode.

Status: contributed by Adrian Likins.

ibm_systemz

This is an IBM SystemZ (or other S/390) hardware partitioning system. Additional facts listed below may also be printed.

ibm_systemz-direct

This is Linux running directly on an IBM SystemZ hardware partitioning system.

This is expected to be a highly unusual configuration - if you see this result you should treat it with suspicion.

Status: not confirmed

ibm_systemz-lpar

This is Linux running directly on an LPAR on an IBM SystemZ hardware partitioning system.

Status: confirmed by Thomas Huth

ibm_systemz-zvm

This is a z/VM guest running in an LPAR on an IBM SystemZ hardware partitioning system.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ using a Fedora guest running in z/VM

ibm_systemz-kvm

This is a KVM guest running on an IBM System Z hardware system.

Status: contributed by Thomas Huth

illumos-lx

The guest is running on Illumos with a Linux syscall emulation layer.

Status: contributed by Steve Mokris

ldoms

The guest appears to be running on a Linux SPARC system with Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) support.

Status: contributed by Darren Kenny

ldoms-control

The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) control domain.

Status: contributed by Darren Kenny

ldoms-guest

The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) guest domain.

Status: contributed by Darren Kenny

ldoms-io

The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) I/O domain.

Status: contributed by Darren Kenny

ldoms-root

The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) Root domain.

Status: contributed by Darren Kenny

linux_vserver

This is printed for backwards compatibility with older virt-what which could not distinguish between a Linux VServer container guest and host.

linux_vserver-guest

This process is running in a Linux VServer container.

Status: contributed by Barış Metin

linux_vserver-host

This process is running as the Linux VServer host (VxID 0).

Status: contributed by Barış Metin and Elan Ruusamäe

lxc

This process is running in a Linux LXC container.

Status: contributed by Marc Fournier

kvm

This guest is running on the KVM hypervisor using hardware acceleration.

Note that if the hypervisor is using software acceleration you should not see this, but should see the qemu fact instead.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ.

lkvm

This guest is running on the KVM hypervisor using hardware acceleration, and the userspace component of the hypervisor is lkvm (a.k.a kvmtool).

Status: contributed by Andrew Jones

nutanix_ahv

The guest is running inside Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

Status: confirmed by RWMJ.

oci

The guest is running in an OCI container.

Status: contributed by Alessandro Valentini, confirmed by RWMJ

openvz

The guest appears to be running inside an OpenVZ or Virtuozzo container.

Status: contributed by Evgeniy Sokolov

ovirt

The guest is running on an oVirt node. (See also rhev below).

Status: contributed by RWMJ, not confirmed

parallels

The guest is running inside Parallels Virtual Platform (Parallels Desktop, Parallels Server).

Status: contributed by Justin Clift

podman

This is a Podman container.  (See also oci above.)

Status: contributed by Jordan Webb

powervm_lx86

The guest is running inside IBM PowerVM Lx86 Linux/x86 emulator.

Status: data originally supplied by Jeffrey Scheel, confirmed by Yufang Zhang and RWMJ

qemu

This is QEMU hypervisor using software emulation.

Note that for KVM (hardware accelerated) guests you should not see this.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ.

rhev

The guest is running on a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) node.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

redhat

The guest is running on the Red Hat hypervisor.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

uml

This is a User-Mode Linux (UML) guest.

Status: contributed by Laurent Léonard

upcloud

This is running on UpCloud.

Status: contributed by Ville Skyttä

virt

Some sort of virtualization appears to be present, but we are not sure what it is.  In some very rare corner cases where we know that virtualization is hard to detect, we will try a timing attack to see if certain machine instructions are running much more slowly than they should be, which would indicate virtualization.  In this case, the generic fact virt is printed.

virtage

This is Hitachi Virtualization Manager (HVM) Virtage hardware partitioning system.

Status: data supplied by Bhavna Sarathy, not confirmed

virtualbox

This is a VirtualBox guest.

Status: contributed by Laurent Léonard

virtualpc

The guest appears to be running on Microsoft VirtualPC.

Status: not confirmed

vmm

This is a vmm (OpenBSD hypervisor) guest.

Status: contributed by Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse.

vmware

The guest appears to be running on VMware hypervisor.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

xen

The guest appears to be running on Xen hypervisor.

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

xen-dom0

This is the Xen dom0 (privileged domain).

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

xen-domU

This is a Xen domU (paravirtualized guest domain).

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

xen-hvm

This is a Xen guest fully virtualized (HVM).

Status: confirmed by RWMJ

Programs that use or wrap virt-what should check that the exit status is 0 before they attempt to parse the output of the command.

A non-zero exit status indicates some error, for example, an unrecognized command line argument.  If the exit status is non-zero then the output "facts" (if any were printed) cannot be guaranteed and should be ignored.

The exit status does not have anything to do with whether the program is running on baremetal or under virtualization, nor with whether virt-what managed detection "correctly" (which is basically unknowable given the large variety of virtualization systems out there and that some systems deliberately emulate others).

virt-what is designed so that you can easily run it from other programs or wrap it up in a library.

Your program should check the exit status (see the section above).

Some programming languages (notably Python: issue 1652) erroneously mask the SIGPIPE signal and do not restore it when executing subprocesses.  virt-what is a shell script and some shell commands do not work correctly when you do this.  You may see warnings from virt-what similar to this:

 echo: write error: Broken pipe

The solution is to set the SIGPIPE signal handler back to SIG_DFL before running virt-what.

Most of the time, using this program is the wrong thing to do. Instead you should detect the specific features you actually want to use.  (As an example, if you wanted to issue Xen hypervisor commands you would look for the /proc/xen/privcmd file).

However people keep asking for this, so we provide it.  There are a few legitimate uses:

Bug reporting tool

If you think that virtualization could affect how your program runs, then you might use virt-what to report this in a bug reporting tool.

Status display and monitoring tools

You might include this information in status and monitoring programs.

System tuning (sometimes)

You might use this program to tune an operating system so it runs better as a virtual machine of a particular hypervisor.  However if installing paravirtualized drivers, it's better to check for the specific features your drivers need (eg. for the presence of PCI devices).

virt-what-cvm(1), <http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/>, <http://www.vmware.com/>, <http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc>, <http://xensource.com/>, <http://bellard.org/qemu/>, <http://kvm.qumranet.com/>, <http://openvz.org/>

Richard W.M. Jones <rjones @ redhat . com>

(C) Copyright 2008-2024 Red Hat Inc., <http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Bugs can be viewed on the Red Hat Bugzilla page: <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/>.

If you find a bug in virt-what, please follow these steps to report it:

1. Check for existing bug reports

Go to <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/> and search for similar bugs. Someone may already have reported the same bug, and they may even have fixed it.

2. Capture debug and error messages

Run

 virt-what > virt-what.log 2>&1

and keep virt-what.log.  It may contain error messages which you should submit with your bug report.

3. Get version of virt-what.

Run

 virt-what --version

4. Submit a bug report.

Go to <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/> and enter a new bug. Please describe the problem in as much detail as possible.

Remember to include the version numbers (step 3) and the debug messages file (step 2) and as much other detail as possible.

5. Assign the bug to rjones @ redhat.com

Assign or reassign the bug to rjones @ redhat.com (without the spaces).  You can also send me an email with the bug number if you want a faster response.