grant user access to /dev/kvm ubuntu code example

Example 1: where is /dev/kvm

This is how I got it to work in Ubuntu 18.04

1. Install qemu-kvm
$sudo apt install qemu-kvm

2. Add your user to kvm group using:
$sudo adduser <Replace with username> kvm


3.If still showing permission denied:
$ sudo chown <Replace with username> /dev/kvm

This works!

Example 2: grant current user access to /dev/kvm

To check the ownership of /dev/kvm use

ls -al /dev/kvm
The user was root, the group kvm. To check which users are in the kvm group, use

grep kvm /etc/group
This returned

kvm:x:some_number:
on my system: as there is nothing rightwards of the final :, there are no users in the kvm group.

To add your user to the kvm group, you could use

sudo adduser $USER kvm