How to enable minikube kvm2 driver on Ubuntu 18.04

Verify kvm2 support

Confirm virtualization support by CPU

 egrep -c ‘(svm|vmx)’ /proc/cpuinfo

An output of 1 or more indicate that CPU can use virtualization technology.

sudo kvm-ok

Output “KVM acceleration can be used. ” indicate that the system has virtualization enabled and KVM can be used.

Install kvm packages

 sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin bridge-utils virt-manager 

Start libvirtd service

 sudo service libvirtd start 

Add your user to libvirt and kvm group

sudo adduser `id -un` libvirt
sudo adduser `id -un` kvm

and re-login the user

 sudo login -f `id -un` 

Verify installation

 virsh list --all 
#and 
 virt-host-validate 

If above show no FAIL statuses and no errors when kvm part is done.
In case of: ” libvir: Remote error : Permission denied ” verify which group libvirtd is using

grep "unix_sock_group" /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf 

Check /dev/kvm is in ‘kvm’ group

ls -l /dev/kvm
crw-rw---- 1 root kvm 10, 232 Dec 10 11:15 /dev/kvm 

Check /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock is in ‘libvirt’ group

ls -l /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-socks
rwxrwx--- 1 root libvirt 0 Dec 10 10:45 /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock 

In case groups are different update the group:

sudo chown root:kvm /dev/kvm 

Now you need to either re-login or restart the kernel modules:

rmmod kvm
modprobe -a kvm

Docker machine kvm2 driver

docker-machine-driver-kvm2 driver

To support kvm2 driver minikube required docker-machine-driver-kvm2 to be installed in system $PATH. Latest minikube version will download that driver in bootstrap process. Upgrading to latest minikube will help with that step.

Update minikube settings to use kvm2 driver

minikube config set vm-driver kvm2  

If you don’t want to set kvm2 as default driver you can use --vm-driver kvm2 option in minikube start command.

Start minikube with kvm2

minikube start --memory=16384 --cpus=4 -p minikube-kvm2 --vm-driver kvm2

Expected output:

Downloading driver docker-machine-driver-kvm2
minikube v1.5.2 on Ubuntu 18.04
Creating kvm2 VM (CPUs=4, Memory=6688MB, Disk=20000MB) ...
Preparing Kubernetes v1.16.2 on Docker '18.09.9' ...

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