https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1528502 So imagine you have /dev/blah symlink which points to /dev/sda. You attach /dev/blah as disk to your domain. Libvirt correctly creates the /dev/blah -> /dev/sda symlink in the qemu namespace. However, then you detach the disk, change the symlink so that it points to /dev/sdb and tries to attach the disk again. This time, however, the attach fails (well, qemu attaches wrong disk) because the code assumes that symlinks don't change. Well they do. This is inspired by test fix written by Eduardo Habkost. Signed-off-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn(a)redhat.com&gt; --- src/qemu/qemu_domain.c | 22 ++++++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/qemu/qemu_domain.c b/src/qemu/qemu_domain.c index 70fb40650..5f29d1ad5 100644 --- a/src/qemu/qemu_domain.c +++ b/src/qemu/qemu_domain.c @@ -9737,13 +9737,23 @@ qemuDomainAttachDeviceMknodHelper(pid_t pid ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED, if (isLink) { VIR_DEBUG("Creating symlink %s -> %s", data->file, data->target); + + /* First, unlink the symlink target. Symlinks change and + * therefore we have no guarantees that pre-existing + * symlink is still valid. */ + if (unlink(data->file) < 0 && + errno != ENOENT) { + virReportSystemError(errno, + _("Unable to remove symlink %s"), + data->file); + goto cleanup; + } + if (symlink(data->target, data->file) < 0) { - if (errno != EEXIST) { - virReportSystemError(errno, - _("Unable to create symlink %s"), - data->target); - goto cleanup; - } + virReportSystemError(errno, + _("Unable to create symlink %s"), + data->target); + goto cleanup; } else { delDevice = true; } -- 2.13.6