Gnome Boxes won't start virtual machines

masonbee November 28, 2021 Fedora

Although this is a specific use case it will show the solution to a possible problem of Gnome Boxes not booting images.

In this case it is because I wanted place my virtual machines on another disk so I deleted the images directory at /home/username/.local/share/gnome-boxes and replaced it with a soft link to another directory /Virtual which is on another disk but is owned by my user and group. This is on Fedora 34 by the way.

Unfortunately when trying to boot the a virtual machine it would fail and I couldn't really find anything in the logs that was helpful (admittedly, I did not look for long). After that I looked at the SELinux Troubleshooter to see if there were any errors and low and behold there were and there was also a solution. A slightly verbose one.

SELinux Troubleshooter says if you scroll down,

If you want to allow qemu-system-x86 to have read access on the images lnk_file
Then you need to change the label on images
Do
# semanage fcontext -a -t FILE_TYPE 'images'
where FILE_TYPE is one of the following: admin_home_t, alsa_etc_rw_t, alsa_home_t, antivirus_home_t, audio_home_t, auth_home_t, bin_t, boot_t, cache_home_t, cert_t, chrome_sandbox_home_t, config_home_t, container_file_t, container_home_t, container_ro_file_t, cvs_home_t, data_home_t, dbus_home_t, device_t, devlog_t, etc_runtime_t, etc_t, fetchmail_home_t, fonts_cache_t, fonts_t, gconf_home_t, git_user_content_t, gkeyringd_gnome_home_t, gnome_home_t, gpg_secret_t, gstreamer_home_t, home_bin_t, home_cert_t, home_root_t, icc_data_home_t, iceauth_home_t, irc_home_t, irc_tmp_t, irssi_home_t, kismet_home_t, krb5_home_t, ld_so_t, lib_t, local_login_home_t, locale_t, mail_home_rw_t, mail_home_t, man_cache_t, man_t, mandb_home_t, mnt_t, mozilla_home_t, mpd_home_t, mpd_user_data_t, mplayer_home_t, mysqld_home_t, net_conf_t, nfs_t, openshift_var_lib_t, polipo_cache_home_t, polipo_config_home_t, proc_t, procmail_home_t, public_content_rw_t, public_content_t, pulseaudio_home_t, qemu_var_run_t, rlogind_home_t, root_t, rpm_script_tmp_t, rssh_ro_t, rssh_rw_t, sandbox_file_t, screen_home_t, security_t, shell_exec_t, spamc_home_t, speech_dispatcher_home_t, src_t, ssh_home_t, svirt_home_t, svirt_image_t, svirt_tmp_t, svirt_tmpfs_t, sysfs_t, system_conf_t, system_db_t, systemd_home_t, telepathy_cache_home_t, telepathy_data_home_t, telepathy_gabble_cache_home_t, telepathy_logger_cache_home_t, telepathy_logger_data_home_t, telepathy_mission_control_cache_home_t, telepathy_mission_control_data_home_t, telepathy_mission_control_home_t, telepathy_sunshine_home_t, texlive_home_t, textrel_shlib_t, thumb_home_t, tmp_t, tvtime_home_t, udev_var_run_t, uml_ro_t, uml_rw_t, usbfs_t, user_fonts_cache_t, user_fonts_config_t, user_fonts_t, user_home_dir_t, user_home_t, user_tmp_t, usr_t, var_run_t, var_t, virt_content_t, virt_etc_rw_t, virt_home_t, virt_image_t, virt_var_lib_t, virt_var_run_t, vmware_conf_t, vmware_file_t, wine_home_t, wireshark_home_t, xauth_home_t, xdm_home_t.
Then execute:
restorecon -v 'images'

Which is great because it pretty much tells you exactly what to do.

Change to the images parent directory,

cd /home/username/.local/share/gnome-boxes

And run semanage with the given qemu_var_run_t as the FILE_TYPE in the example command.

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t qemu_var_run_t 'images'

Then run restorecon to set the changes,

restorecon -v 'images'

And suddenly your virtual machines will start loading. I strongly recommend installing the SELinux Troubleshooter to beginners with SELinux. It's really very helpful and a good first stop when things mysteriously fail to work.

On Fedora 34 you can install it with,