openstack-libvirt-oshelm

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for openstack-libvirt-oshelm

Minimal libvirt/QEMU image compatible with the upstream openstack-helm libvirt image.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/openstack-libvirt-oshelm:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

openstack-libvirt-oshelm

Minimal libvirt and QEMU image for openstack-helm, compatible with the upstream airshipit/libvirt image the libvirt chart targets by default.

The image carries the hypervisor stack only and no OpenStack service. The chart runs it as the privileged libvirt DaemonSet that nova-compute drives on every compute node. Use it together with the openstack-nova-oshelm image.

For kolla-ansible / kayobe deployments use openstack-nova-libvirt-kolla instead; it follows kolla's kolla_start contract rather than openstack-helm's.

OpenStack Release Streams

The image is tagged per OpenStack release (e.g. 2026.1 Gazpacho), matching the upstream <release>-ubuntu_noble tags. Each release carries the Ceph and Open vSwitch streams that the openstack-nova-<release> packages use, so libvirt and nova-compute agree. Tags such as 2026.1-12.8.0 pin the libvirt version within a release.

Compatibility Notes

• The image runs as root, matching the chart's runAsUser: 0.
• The nova account is uid/gid 42424 with its home at /var/lib/nova, so the chart's qemu.conf (user = "nova", group = "kvm") resolves. The tss account (42434) is present for vTPM guests.
• The monolithic libvirtd daemon is included, with the QEMU, network, nwfilter, nodedev, secret, interface and storage drivers. The Ceph RBD storage driver is included too.
• QEMU system emulators for x86_64 and aarch64 are included, with UEFI firmware, iPXE ROMs, swtpm, the RBD and iSCSI block drivers, and USB host device passthrough. Upstream's qemu-system metapackage also ships the arm, ppc, s390x, mips and other emulators; those are not included.
• The Ceph client (ceph, rbd), Open vSwitch (ovs-vsctl), ebtables, cgcreate/cgexec, systemd-run, modprobe, dmidecode and ssh are included for the chart's startup script and libvirt's helpers.
• iptables and ip6tables pick the legacy or nf_tables backend on first use, matching the rules already on the host; upstream always uses nf_tables.
• Unlike upstream, the libvirt default NAT network isn't shipped. The chart masks /etc/libvirt/qemu with a hostPath, so upstream's copy never takes effect either.
• libvirt 12.8 and QEMU 11.1 replace upstream's libvirt 10.0 and QEMU 8.2, and the Ubuntu-specific machine types (pc-q35-noble, pc-i440fx-noble, ...) are not available. Guests defined with those machine types on an upstream-image node won't start on, or live-migrate to, this image.

Getting Started

Point the openstack-helm libvirt chart at this image in your values file:

images:
  tags:
    libvirt: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/openstack-libvirt-oshelm:2026.1

Configuration

Configuration comes from the chart, which renders libvirtd.conf and qemu.conf and mounts them at /etc/libvirt/. See the openstack-helm libvirt chart and the libvirt documentation for the full set of options.

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.