Yes, you are right.
Listen, as the documentation is not very exaustive, can you explain briefly to me how a guest agent works?
After installing it via the apt-get on the hypervisor (I am using ubuntu as host system) how can I create a script which would do this?
That is waiting for an acpi signal and actually shut down the guest.

And what other operation can you actually do with a guest agent? I would be interested in getting the current amount of memory the guest is using too...as libvirt apis just tell me the max memory allocated.


2014-03-29 15:12 GMT+01:00 Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>:
On 03/29/2014 06:21 AM, Pasquale Dir wrote:
> I am looking at the shutdown method, but if the guest system is a desktop
> system, like for example ubuntu, it just has the effect to show a box
> prompting the user for a shutdown/reboot/ and such.
>
> I could enter the guest and change this default behaviour and it actually
> works..but I'd like for a way to send a shutdown command without doing so.
>
> Is it possible?

Guest shutdown is ALWAYS a cooperative action.  It sounds like your
guest defaults to an interactive shutdown when an ACPI shutdown request
is received.  You can install qemu-guest-agent in your guest and send
shutdown via the agent instead of via ACPI - that may be a bit more
responsive at doing an immediate shutdown.  But beyond that, no, there
is no way to guarantee a graceful guest shutdown without guest
cooperation.  If you must stop a guest, and shutdown is taking too long
because the guest is not cooperating, then use the 'virsh destroy' command.

--
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org