On 06/24/2016 09:48 AM, Ken Teh wrote:
> I was trying to set up dnsmasq and discovered it's already running.
> Apparently as part of libvirt.  Why is libvirt started?  What starts it?
>
> I tried looking through systemd output but the only thing about systemd
> that I can understand are its services.  Everything else is so far
> gobbledy-gook.

I ran into this recently on my Fedora laptop.  It was quite 
annoying/frustrating to find out about this default configuration.  I 
issued a 'systemctl stop libvirtd' and 'systemctl disable libvirtd' to 
disable it.  It is used for the virtualization system, which relies on 
dnsmasq for the virtual lan these days...  It uses an alternate 
configuration file than the normal /etc/dnsmasq.d/ files or wherever 
they live these days.  Aft4r that, I as able to configure it as I 
normally do and start it using 'systemctl start dnsmasq'.

If you rely on it for virtualization, you probably have to go fiddle 
with libvirtd's alternate dnsmasq config files to add the options you 
need for other purposes.  This wasn't the case for me.