How to set up the driver

See also: Driver, local.driver

This document demonstrates how to choose, set up, and manage the drivers behind Multipass. Multipass already has sensible defaults, so this is an optional step.

Default driver

By default, Multipass on Linux uses the qemu driver.

Install an alternative driver

An alternative option is to use VirtualBox.

To switch the Multipass driver to VirtualBox, run this command:

sudo multipass set local.driver=virtualbox

From now on, all instances started with multipass launch will use VirtualBox behind the scenes.

Use the driver to view Multipass instances

You can view instances with libvirt in two ways, using the virsh CLI or the virt-manager GUI.

To use the virsh CLI, launch an instance and then run the command virsh list (see man virsh for a command reference):

virsh list

The output will be similar to the following:

 Id   Name                   State
--------------------------------------
 1    unaffected-gyrfalcon   running

Alternatively, to use the virt-manager GUI, …

Virtual Machine Manager GUI

Use VirtualBox to set up port forwarding for a Multipass instance

This option only applies to macOS and Windows systems.

Use VirtualBox to set up network bridging for a Multipass instance

This option only applies to macOS systems.

Switch back to the default driver

See also: stop, local.driver

To switch back to the default qemu driver, first you need to stop all instances again:

multipass stop --all
multipass set local.driver=qemu

Here, too, existing instances will be migrated.