I have a case where I'm creating a virtio channel between the host and guest using something like this: <channel type="unix"> <source mode="bind" path="/path/in/host/instance_name"/> <target type="virtio" name="name_in_guest"/> </channel> When qemu is started up this gets created as expected, but when qemu is shut down the unix socket is left in the filesystem. It seems to me that libvirt should be deleting this unix socket the same way that it deletes the monitor socket in qemuProcessStop(). Anyone else trying to delete it is going to be subject to race conditions since they can't know whether or not a virtual machine has been (re)created that wants to use the same socket path. Chris