After recent updates I am no longer able to run KVM guests using libvirt/virsh. I’m not sure if it’s the new dependency on audit (2.2.2-1 at the time of writing) or libvirt-1.0.2-2 itself, but guests fail to start for obscure reasons:

# virsh start debian6-dspace
error: Failed to start domain debian6-dspace
error: internal error process exited while connecting to monitor: char device redirected to /dev/pts/3
Could not access KVM kernel module: Permission denied
failed to initialize KVM: Permission denied
No accelerator found!

Permissions on /dev/kvm are ok, and I’m in the kvm group, so there is either something I don’t understand about the audit package (similar to SELinux or AppArmor maybe?) or libvirt is simply broken.

Revert to libvirt-1.0.1

Reverting to the previously-installed version of libvirt seems to work:

# systemctl stop libvirtd
# pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/libvirt-1.0.1-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

I had libvirt-1.0.1-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz in my cache, but you could always look for one in the Arch Rollback Machine if you don’t have an older version locally.

Note: there seem to be other problems with libvirt 1.0.2 (see upstream bug #909734), so this is possibly a related upstream issue.