poll() will be listening for i/o on the libvirt socket as well as stdin, so it'll see incoming I/O from the guest.
That's strange, that's not what I'm seeing when running it step-by-step. I see poll() hanging regardless of guest events. There are indeed two fds in the array (stdin and the other one being the libvirt socket I suppose), but in all cases, I never observed an event occurring on the libvirt socket. Am I missing a call to something here? Note that I'm using 1.0.5.5 (daemon and library). Could things have changed recently?
One relevant thing is that stdio is line buffered by default and you aren't putting it into raw mode like virsh console does. This will delay I/O on the stdio streams.
That's a good point. But since all the messages between host and guest end in newlines, that shouldn't be an issue, right? Anyway, I can see the lines from stdin making it to virStreamSend() upon the first <Enter>. And from the other side, it's safe to assume socat sends the data after the first <Enter> as well (since it works fine with socat to socat directly on the socket/port). Thanks, Jonathan