Re: [libvirt] libvirtd shutdown script patches

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 03:00:17PM -0500, Sir Woody Hackswell wrote: It is desirable to stop things when the machine is shutting down. If we put this functionality in the stop() function of the initscript we cannot make this distinction. I thing this would thus have to go in a separate initscrpit that is configured to run before the main libvirtd initscript. This ensures that if admin just wants to stop/start the daemon, their domains are not touched, but if the whole machine is shutdown, things are cleanly shutdown.

Shutting down is not neccessarily the only thing an admin would want to do with guests. They may wish to save guests to a file. Or migrate them to a separate machine. In the case of saving to a file, you ahve the added complication that when libvirtd later starts on next boot, instead of auto-starting, you want it to restore from the saved file. This will entail additional logic in libvirtd. I also don't particularly like having this functionality split between the init scripts and the daemon, because the init script is neccessarily Red Hat specific, and there's many other distros using libvirt. My preference would be to have an explicit way to tell libvirtd to shutdown/save all running guests so initscript only needed a single command to do the job, and all the functional / timeout / waiting logic was in the daemon.