libvirt does not wait for guests to shut down

[Nathaniel W. Turner]

In previous releases, such as 14.04, a host shutdown would initiate a clean shutdown of all libvirt guests, and wait (up to some configurable amount) for them to cleanly shut down before proceeding with the host shutdown.

In wily, this no longer happens, and a clean host shutdown results in a dirty shutdown of all guest VMs.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Thanks for filing this bug. We had fixed this in the upstart script, but systemd is using the sysvinit script, so we need to augment its stop() handler to also shut down vms.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Unfortunately this can't be fixed in the sysvinit script , because '/etc/init.d/libvirt-bin stop' is not caled until all vms have already been killed. We'll need to write a systemd unit for libvirt.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package libvirt - 1.2.16-2ubuntu8

---------------
libvirt (1.2.16-2ubuntu8) wily; urgency=medium

  * Support OVMF images in virt-aa-helper. (LP: #1483071)
  * Fix the libvirt-bin.preinst to not stop libvirt-bin on upgrade
    from 1.2.16-2ubuntu7.

 -- Serge Hallyn <email address hidden> Fri, 14 Aug 2015 07:34:30 -0500

[Armin Schindler (armin-melware)]

I have the same problem with Vivid. Will there be a fix / backport available?

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

We can try, however switching the init scripts seems a harder thing to do in an SRU.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Note - a probably unacceptable workaround is to use upstart (sudo apt-get install upstart-sysv).

[Armin Schindler (armin-melware)]

Actually it is a very acceptable workaround. I switched to upstart and it works fine. Boot and shutdown is even faster (which I don't really need in a server environment). The upstart way seems to be more stable and reliable than systemd. My two cents from a server administrator point of view: Avoid this complex systemd thing.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

(The backport to vivid will have to wait for the current vivid-proposed package to clear. It was only accepted yesterday so will be awhile yet)

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Hi,

I'd really prefer to avoid the potential breakage by trying to backport this with 2months left to EOL. So I'm going to mark this wontfix for vivid. If you reall need this, please reply here. Please remember you can work around this by using upstart, or you can upgrade to wily which has the fix.