Dear Tails,
I'd like to propose a little improvement to the Tails Builder VM.
My use-case is that I build Tails locally on my laptop. My concern is a
little lack of convenience: if ever I forget to close the Tails Builder
VM (using `rake vm:halt`) after I'm done, the laptop gets stuck at
shutdown. I can see these log messages:
libvirt-guests.sh: Waiting for guest xxx to shut down, 300 seconds left
libvirt-guests.sh: Waiting for guest xxx to shut down, 295 seconds left
...
So basically, what happens is that systemd tries to stop libvirt guests,
by invoking `/etc/init.d/libvirt-guests stop`. This script ends up in
invoking `virsh shutdown tails-builder-...`. And this command fails.
This is something you can verify by yourself easily. Launch the VM
(`rake vm:up`), then try various ways to stop it. Commands that allow to
stop the VM, from the higher-level to the lower-level, are:
- OK: rake vm:halt
- OK: vagrant halt <vm-id>
- KO: virsh -c qemu:///system shutdown <name>
At the libvirt level, stopping the VM doesn't work. To start with,
anyone can confirm that, or am I the only one having this behavior ?
After a bit of digging and experimenting, it turns out that this is not
a bug, just the expected behavior. It seems that libvirt tries to
shutdown the VM by speaking to the QEmu Guest Agent, which is not
installed on the VM. So nothing happens, and the libvirt shutdown script
gets stuck there, and my laptop doesn't shutdown.
So !
I did just that, installed the QEmu guest agent on the VM, enabled it in
the Vagrantfile, and since then my life is so much better, and my laptop
shuts down reliably and peacefully. It's a real improvement to me.
Are you guys interested in enabling that upstream ? Should I open a
ticket along with the patch ? Or is there some reasons why you didn't
enable the QEmu guest agent in the first place ?
Cheers !
Arnaud
----
References:
<https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Virtualization_Deployment_and_Administration_Guide/chap-QEMU_Guest_Agent.html>
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