Installation

Dicer runs on one Linux host, as a daemon, dicerd, managed by systemd, with the dicer command line beside it. The install script builds both from source and sets the daemon up.

Requirements

The host

• Linux on x86_64 or aarch64, with systemd.
• KVM: /dev/kvm must exist. On a cloud virtual machine, that means one with nested virtualisation enabled.
• erofs-utils, for mkfs.erofs, and e2fsprogs, for mkfs.ext4 and mke2fs.
• iptables.

To build

• Go 1.25 or later, git, make and curl.

On Debian or Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install erofs-utils e2fsprogs iptables git make curl

and Go from go.dev/dl, as distributions often carry an older one.

Check that KVM is there:

$ ls -l /dev/kvm
crw-rw---- 1 root kvm 10, 232 Sep 24 09:12 /dev/kvm

Install

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/konradasb/dicer/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

The script asks for sudo when it needs it, then:

1. checks the requirements above;
2. builds dicer and dicerd, with the hypervisors and guest binaries dicerd carries, from the main branch;
3. installs both to /usr/local/bin;
4. writes a configuration, /etc/dicerd/config.yaml, unless there is one;
5. turns on IPv4 forwarding, now and at every boot;
6. installs dicerd.service, enables it and starts it.

--ref builds a branch, tag or commit instead of main:

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/konradasb/dicer/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --ref v0.2.0

Check it

$ sudo systemctl status dicerd
$ sudo dicer version
$ sudo dicer info

dicer info shows the daemon, the hypervisors it carries, and how much of the host’s CPU, memory and disk it may give instances.

The daemon’s socket belongs to root, so dicer is run with sudo on the host. See Remote access to manage the host from another machine.

Upgrade and remove

Running the install script again upgrades Dicer, without stopping the instances that are running. uninstall.sh removes it. See Operating the daemon for both.

Next steps