Currently the openshift-baremetal-install binary is dynamically linked to libvirt-client, meaning that it is only possible to run it on a RHEL system with libvirt installed.

A new version of the libvirt bindings, v1.8010.0, allows the library to be loaded only on demand, so that users who do not execute any libvirt code can run the rest of the installer without needing to install libvirt. (See this comment from Dan Berrangé.) In practice, the "rest of the installer" is everything except the baremetal destroy cluster command (which destroys the bootstrap storage pool - though only if the bootstrap itself has already been successfully destroyed - and has probably never been used by anybody ever). The Terraform providers all run in a separate binary.

There is also a pure-go libvirt library that can be used even within a statically-linked binary on any platform, even when interacting with libvirt. The libvirt terraform provider that does almost all of our interaction with libvirt already uses this library.