Re: [libvirt-users] Possible to change 'machine type' attribute while vm is running?

On 02/09/2015 01:24 PM, Andre Goree wrote: In general, no, because it would be a guest-visible change, and guests don't react well to hardware ABI changing in the middle of a running system. Sadly, I think a shutdown is the only working approach. Specifying a different machine type tells qemu to present different hardware to the guest, which really only works on fresh guest boots (and even then, Windows guests tend to want revalidation of the license key). On the rare case that the different spellings of the machine type do NOT change the hardware, it might be possible to take a saved guest image, edit that file to swap out the machine type, and then restore from the saved image; at least that way you won't lose guest state and the downtime can be shorter than a full reboot cycle. But I'm not familiar enough with pc-i440fx-trusty vs. pc-i440fx-1.7 (both are downstream-only machine names from Debian, not in upstream qemu) to know if that is the case. That tool is not provided by upstream; maybe it is a downstream Debian tool? And from the name, that may indeed be the tool that does what you want? -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org