Gnome Boxes stopped working

Ask Fedora
1

Hello,
I have launched Gnome Boxes, and it said: “Boxes cannot access the virtualization backend.”
The output of gnome-boxes --checks is:
(gnome-boxes:9008): Boxes-WARNING **: 16:13:52.070: util-app.vala:350: Failed to execute: virsh capabilities
• The CPU is capable of virtualization: yes
• The KVM module is loaded: yes
• Libvirt KVM guest available: no
• Boxes storage pool available: no
Could not get “gnome-boxes” storage pool information from libvirt. Make sure “virsh -c qemu:///session pool-dumpxml gnome-boxes” is working.
• The SELinux context is default: yes

virsh -c qemu:///session pool-dumpxml gnome-boxes doesn’t throw any errors.

What can I do?

1 Like
2

What does it say? Does it give a success message, or no output at all?

3

It prints a message which is in some sort of markup language, probably XML.
I tried to include it in the post, but the site thought it was HTML, so you couldn’t see any of it.

4

Did you try to include the output in <code></code> tags?

5

Still doesn’t work…

6

Wait.
I tried running the command twice, and on the first time, it outputted the same message, but on the second time it threw an error:
error: failed to connect to the hypervisor
error: Failed to connect socket to ‘/run/user/1000/libvirt/libvirt-sock’: No such file or directory
It’s very weird.

7

Could I just reinstall gnome boxes?
Is there a way to do that while keeping the VMs?

8

Please check is the daemon is running:

this problem can be also that libvirtd its not running check if is active and running whitout error, if its that so try:

    sudo systemctl enable libvirtd   # enable service on boot
    sudo systemctl start libvirtd    # start the service
    sudo systemctl status libvirtd   # check the status of the service

OR

sudo systemctl restart libvirtd

sudo dnf reinstall gnome-boxes

ALSO, check your log to see any error, the unit is libvirtd:

Regards.,

9

Now that’s really weird.
Sometimes Gnome Boxes will run just fine, and sometimes it won’t work.
If it doesn’t work, running gnome-boxes --checkes and relaunching it will fix it somehow.
Also, the output of gnome-boxes --checkes changes like every time I run it between:
(gnome-boxes:21551): Boxes-WARNING **: 19:41:42.927: util-app.vala:350: Failed to execute: virsh capabilities
• The CPU is capable of virtualization: yes
• The KVM module is loaded: yes
• Libvirt KVM guest available: no
• Boxes storage pool available: yes
• The SELinux context is default: yes

And:
(gnome-boxes:21766): Boxes-WARNING **: 19:43:38.502: util-app.vala:350: Failed to execute: virsh capabilities
• The CPU is capable of virtualization: yes
• The KVM module is loaded: yes
• Libvirt KVM guest available: no
• Boxes storage pool available: no
Could not get “gnome-boxes” storage pool information from libvirt. Make sure “virsh -c qemu:///session pool-dumpxml gnome-boxes” is working.
• The SELinux context is default: yes

I tried reinstalling and it doesn’t help.
This is getting very strange.