5 virt-what - detect if we are running in a virtual machine
13 C<virt-what> is a shell script which can be used to detect if the
14 program is running in a virtual machine.
16 The program prints out a list of "facts" about the virtual machine,
17 derived from heuristics. One fact is printed per line.
19 If nothing is printed and the script exits with code 0 (no error),
20 then it can mean I<either> that the program is running on bare-metal
21 I<or> the program is running inside a type of virtual machine which we
22 don't know about or cannot detect.
28 =item B<alibaba_cloud>
30 =item B<alibaba_cloud-ebm>
32 This is a cloud computing service based on Alibaba Cloud.
34 Status: contributed by Weisson.
40 Note that virt-what will print this fact for baremetal AWS instances,
41 which you might not consider to be true virtualization. In this case
42 other facts (eg. C<kvm> or C<xen>) would I<not> be present.
44 Status: contributed by Qi Guo, Vitaly Kuznetsov, confirmed by RWMJ.
48 This is a bhyve (FreeBSD hypervisor) guest.
50 Status: contributed by Leonardo Brondani Schenkel.
54 The guest is running in a CRI-O container.
56 Status: suggested by Alessandro Taufer, confirmed by RWMJ & Xiaodai Wang
60 This is a Docker container.
62 Status: confirmed by Charles Nguyen
66 This is running on Google Cloud Platform / Google Compute Engine.
68 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
72 This is Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
74 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
76 =item B<ibm_power-kvm>
78 This is an IBM POWER KVM guest.
80 Status: contributed by Adrian Likins.
82 =item B<ibm_power-lpar_shared>
84 =item B<ibm_power-lpar_dedicated>
86 This is an IBM POWER LPAR (hardware partition) in either shared
89 Status: contributed by Adrian Likins.
93 This is an IBM SystemZ (or other S/390) hardware partitioning system.
94 Additional facts listed below may also be printed.
96 =item B<ibm_systemz-direct>
98 This is Linux running directly on an IBM SystemZ hardware partitioning
101 This is expected to be a highly unusual configuration - if
102 you see this result you should treat it with suspicion.
104 Status: not confirmed
106 =item B<ibm_systemz-lpar>
108 This is Linux running directly on an LPAR on an IBM SystemZ
109 hardware partitioning system.
111 Status: confirmed by Thomas Huth
113 =item B<ibm_systemz-zvm>
115 This is a z/VM guest running in an LPAR on an IBM SystemZ
116 hardware partitioning system.
118 Status: confirmed by RWMJ using a Fedora guest running in z/VM
120 =item B<ibm_systemz-kvm>
122 This is a KVM guest running on an IBM System Z hardware system.
124 Status: contributed by Thomas Huth
128 The guest is running on Illumos with a Linux syscall emulation layer.
130 Status: contributed by Steve Mokris
134 The guest appears to be running on a Linux SPARC system with
135 Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) support.
137 Status: contributed by Darren Kenny
139 =item B<ldoms-control>
141 The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) control domain.
143 Status: contributed by Darren Kenny
147 The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) guest domain.
149 Status: contributed by Darren Kenny
153 The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) I/O domain.
155 Status: contributed by Darren Kenny
159 The is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains) Root domain.
161 Status: contributed by Darren Kenny
163 =item B<linux_vserver>
165 This is printed for backwards compatibility with older virt-what which
166 could not distinguish between a Linux VServer container guest and
169 =item B<linux_vserver-guest>
171 This process is running in a Linux VServer container.
173 Status: contributed by Barış Metin
175 =item B<linux_vserver-host>
177 This process is running as the Linux VServer host (VxID 0).
179 Status: contributed by Barış Metin and Elan Ruusamäe
183 This process is running in a Linux LXC container.
185 Status: contributed by Marc Fournier
189 This guest is running on the KVM hypervisor using hardware
192 Note that if the hypervisor is using software acceleration
193 you should I<not> see this, but should see the C<qemu> fact
196 Status: confirmed by RWMJ.
200 This guest is running on the KVM hypervisor using hardware
201 acceleration, and the userspace component of the hypervisor
202 is lkvm (a.k.a kvmtool).
204 Status: contributed by Andrew Jones
208 The guest is running inside Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).
210 Status: confirmed by RWMJ.
214 The guest is running in an OCI container.
216 Status: contributed by Alessandro Valentini, confirmed by RWMJ
220 The guest appears to be running inside an OpenVZ or Virtuozzo
223 Status: contributed by Evgeniy Sokolov
227 The guest is running on an oVirt node.
228 (See also C<rhev> below).
230 Status: contributed by RWMJ, not confirmed
234 The guest is running inside Parallels Virtual Platform
235 (Parallels Desktop, Parallels Server).
237 Status: contributed by Justin Clift
241 This is a Podman container. (See also C<oci> above.)
243 Status: contributed by Jordan Webb
245 =item B<powervm_lx86>
247 The guest is running inside IBM PowerVM Lx86 Linux/x86 emulator.
249 Status: data originally supplied by Jeffrey Scheel, confirmed by
250 Yufang Zhang and RWMJ
254 This is QEMU hypervisor using software emulation.
256 Note that for KVM (hardware accelerated) guests you should I<not> see
259 Status: confirmed by RWMJ.
263 The guest is running on a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) node.
265 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
269 The guest is running on the Red Hat hypervisor.
271 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
275 This is a User-Mode Linux (UML) guest.
277 Status: contributed by Laurent Léonard
281 This is running on UpCloud.
283 Status: contributed by Ville Skyttä
287 Some sort of virtualization appears to be present, but we are not sure
288 what it is. In some very rare corner cases where we know that
289 virtualization is hard to detect, we will try a timing attack to see
290 if certain machine instructions are running much more slowly than they
291 should be, which would indicate virtualization. In this case, the
292 generic fact C<virt> is printed.
296 This is Hitachi Virtualization Manager (HVM) Virtage
297 hardware partitioning system.
299 Status: data supplied by Bhavna Sarathy, not confirmed
303 This is a VirtualBox guest.
305 Status: contributed by Laurent Léonard
309 The guest appears to be running on Microsoft VirtualPC.
311 Status: not confirmed
315 This is a vmm (OpenBSD hypervisor) guest.
317 Status: contributed by Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse.
321 The guest appears to be running on VMware hypervisor.
323 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
327 The guest appears to be running on Xen hypervisor.
329 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
333 This is the Xen dom0 (privileged domain).
335 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
339 This is a Xen domU (paravirtualized guest domain).
341 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
345 This is a Xen guest fully virtualized (HVM).
347 Status: confirmed by RWMJ
353 Programs that use or wrap C<virt-what> should check that the exit
354 status is 0 before they attempt to parse the output of the command.
356 A non-zero exit status indicates some error, for example, an
357 unrecognized command line argument. If the exit status is non-zero
358 then the output "facts" (if any were printed) cannot be guaranteed and
361 The exit status does I<not> have anything to do with whether the
362 program is running on baremetal or under virtualization, nor with
363 whether C<virt-what> managed detection "correctly" (which is basically
364 unknowable given the large variety of virtualization systems out there
365 and that some systems deliberately emulate others).
367 =head1 RUNNING VIRT-WHAT FROM OTHER PROGRAMS
369 C<virt-what> is designed so that you can easily run it from
370 other programs or wrap it up in a library.
372 Your program should check the exit status (see the section above).
374 Some programming languages (notably Python: issue 1652) erroneously
375 mask the C<SIGPIPE> signal and do not restore it when executing
376 subprocesses. C<virt-what> is a shell script and some shell commands
377 do not work correctly when you do this. You may see warnings from
378 C<virt-what> similar to this:
380 echo: write error: Broken pipe
382 The solution is to set the C<SIGPIPE> signal handler back to C<SIG_DFL>
383 before running C<virt-what>.
385 =head1 IMPORTANT NOTE
387 Most of the time, using this program is the I<wrong> thing to do.
388 Instead you should detect the specific features you actually want to
389 use. (As an example, if you wanted to issue Xen hypervisor commands
390 you would look for the C</proc/xen/privcmd> file).
392 However people keep asking for this, so we provide it. There are a
397 =item Bug reporting tool
399 If you think that virtualization could affect how your program runs,
400 then you might use C<virt-what> to report this in a bug reporting
403 =item Status display and monitoring tools
405 You might include this information in status and monitoring programs.
407 =item System tuning (sometimes)
409 You might use this program to tune an operating system so it runs
410 better as a virtual machine of a particular hypervisor. However if
411 installing paravirtualized drivers, it's better to check for the
412 specific features your drivers need (eg. for the presence of PCI devices).
419 L<http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/>,
420 L<http://www.vmware.com/>,
421 L<http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc>,
422 L<http://xensource.com/>,
423 L<http://bellard.org/qemu/>,
424 L<http://kvm.qumranet.com/>,
425 L<http://openvz.org/>
429 Richard W.M. Jones <rjones @ redhat . com>
433 (C) Copyright 2008-2024 Red Hat Inc.,
434 L<http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/>
436 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
437 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
438 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
439 (at your option) any later version.
441 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
442 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
443 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
444 GNU General Public License for more details.
446 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
447 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
448 Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
450 =head1 REPORTING BUGS
452 Bugs can be viewed on the Red Hat Bugzilla page:
453 L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/>.
455 If you find a bug in virt-what, please follow these steps to report it:
459 =item 1. Check for existing bug reports
461 Go to L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/> and search for similar bugs.
462 Someone may already have reported the same bug, and they may even
465 =item 2. Capture debug and error messages
469 virt-what > virt-what.log 2>&1
471 and keep I<virt-what.log>. It may contain error messages which you
472 should submit with your bug report.
474 =item 3. Get version of virt-what.
480 =item 4. Submit a bug report.
482 Go to L<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/> and enter a new bug.
483 Please describe the problem in as much detail as possible.
485 Remember to include the version numbers (step 3) and the debug
486 messages file (step 2) and as much other detail as possible.
488 =item 5. Assign the bug to rjones @ redhat.com
490 Assign or reassign the bug to B<rjones @ redhat.com> (without the
491 spaces). You can also send me an email with the bug number if you
492 want a faster response.