guidetroubleshootingReviewed July 15, 2026

Guest start failure: evidence-first triage

Preserve the first error. Repeated start attempts can rotate logs, alter locks, and bury the original denial beneath secondary failures. Capture the failed transaction Check dependencies in order Classify the failure bef

start-failureqemuselinuxtriage

Preserve the first error. Repeated start attempts can rotate logs, alter locks, and bury the original denial beneath secondary failures.

Capture the failed transaction

BASH

virsh start guest01
virsh domstate guest01 --reason
journalctl -u virtqemud -u libvirtd --since -10m
tail -n 200 /var/log/libvirt/qemu/guest01.log

Check dependencies in order

BASH

virt-xml-validate /etc/libvirt/qemu/guest01.xml domain
virsh domblklist guest01 --details
virsh domiflist guest01
ls -lZ /var/lib/libvirt/images
ausearch -m AVC,USER_AVC -ts recent

Classify the failure before editing: unsupported capability, missing path, permission or label denial, occupied port, network absence, storage lock, malformed XML, or QEMU process failure.

Repair discipline

Fix the owning layer and retry once. Do not disable SELinux, broaden directory permissions globally, or delete lock files without proving they are stale and understanding ownership.