Create a Plugin Manager

[unsuman]

Description

Implement a plugin manager that discovers, downloads, builds, and manages external VM driver plugins. The manager should be able to locate plugins in standard directories and specified user paths, download from remote locations if necessary, and manage external plugin lifecycles. The external plugin driver names are derived from their executable name, for example lima-plugin-qemu. Standalone binaries will go into <PREFIX>/libexec/lima/plugins/ and LIMA_PLUGINS_PATH for plugins that are built outside of the lima repo.

[afbjorklund]

I think that building plugins is outside of the scope, and that downloading from remote is optional

[unsuman]

I think that building plugins is outside of the scope, and that downloading from remote is optional

Agreed! If a user wants to add a plugin, let's say VirtualBox, which is available in a repo in our lima-vm org. What should be the user flow here?

[afbjorklund]

To be honest I'm not even sure it would be in the same org, but my assumption would be that it would also have "releases"?

Similar to the ones that were available for docker-machine, just a git repository with the driver binary available for download.

• [GSoC 2025] Add framework for adding new drivers at runtime, for instance for cloud #2007

[unsuman]

To be honest I'm not even sure it would be in the same org, but my assumption would be that it would also have "releases"?

Similar to the ones that were available for docker-machine, just a git repository with the driver binary available for download.

• [GSoC 2025] Add framework for adding new drivers at runtime, for instance for cloud #2007

Got it!

[jandubois]

Implement a plugin manager that discovers, downloads, builds, and manages external VM driver plugins.

I too don't think Lima should download and build drivers. It only has to implement the discovery part; building and installation should be done by the user's package manager, or by the user itself, if the driver is not (yet) available from a package repo.

[jandubois]

I think this issue is basically a duplicate of #3549. I don't think there is anything to do beyond what that issue specifies.

The only exception that this issue has an updated strategy to locate drivers:

Standalone binaries will go into /libexec/lima/plugins/ and LIMA_PLUGINS_PATH for plugins that are built outside of the lima repo.

We probably want to use that instead of or in addition to the strategy in #3549.

[AkihiroSuda]

From this lesson we can also learn that VM driver plugins have to be detected via $PATH, not via <PREFIX>/libexec/lima 😓 @unsuman @jandubois @afbjorklund

Originally posted by @AkihiroSuda in #3564 (comment)

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EDIT: this limitation was mitigated in #3566