Comment 24 for bug 734777

Hi,

I am running libvirtd with kvm on a Debian Squeeze host and I am experiencing the same problem from time to time. I'm using virt-manager to control my virtual machines and sometimes libvirtd runs into problems controlling a kvm domain.

I cannot exactly say, when the problem occurs but it usually happens when I start and stop several virtual machines one after another. I.e., I have several virtual machines with test installations for development and since some of them are running unstable versions (Debian for example), I start all the VMs once a week to update them, usually not more than two at the same time since my kvm host has only 4GB of RAM. It then usually happens that the state of the virtual machines is not updated in virt-manager and when trying to start a virtual machine which is powered off, I receive the aforementioned error message.

The problem is always fixed by:

killall -9 libvirtd
rm /var/run/libvirtd.pid
/etc/init.d/libvirt-bin restart

The virtual machines are never affected by this problem, they still continue to run without any problems. It simply seems that libvirtd at some point cannot connect to the kvm host anymore due to a race condition. I'm attaching a screenshot of the error message in virt-manager the last time it happened. In this case, I logged into my Debian Squeeze kvm host over ssh and used X-forwarding to display virt-manager on the MacOS X host. virt-manager was not running on the Mac.

Version numbers:

dpkg -l libvirt\* |grep -e '^ii'
ii libvirt-bin 0.8.3-5 the programs for the libvirt library
ii libvirt0

dpkg -l virt\* |grep -e '^ii'
ii virt-manager 0.8.4-8 desktop application for managing virtual machines
ii virt-viewer 0.2.1-1 Displaying the graphical console of a virtual machine
ii virtinst 0.500.3-2

Regards,

Adrian