[libvirt] Qemu capability probes lifecycle should be tied to libvirtd

[Christian Ehrhardt]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 03:22:57PM +0100, Christian Ehrhardt wrote:
>> Hi,
>> on libvirt 3.10 I see a set of qemu processes used for capability
>> probing [1] (in my case 8x x86_64 and 3xi386 which seems a lot, but
>> ok).
>> But when stopping the service those still stay around [2].
>>
>> That is correct for guests that were started by libvirt as their
>> lifecycle isn't tied to the libvirtd service. But those probes are
>> IMHO tied to the service.
>>
>> At first this might seem non-relevant, but e.g. when users want to
>> uninstall they might think on stopping their guests, but I'd assume no
>> one will clean up the capability probes before the hard removal.
>> But then on the removal scripts will run into issues e.g. failing to
>> remove users as they are still in use by those qemu processes.
>>
>> Right now Distro's have to be aware to clean those up at least at
>> times where packaging would expect them to be gone, but I wanted to
>> ask if there would be a consensus that it would be "correct" to stop
>> the processes on a libvirtd stop?
>
> Well in general they should all be killed immediately after libvirt
> finishes probing the capabilities - they should only live for a fraction
> of a second.

Yes that is how it always was before.
I expected something in a more recent libvirt was changed to keep them
around and thereby debugged in the wrong direction.

Just recently ~1h ago it resolved in my test environment to no more
show up hanging after a restart of libvirtd.

> If these are getting stuck, it is an indication of a bug somewhere
> in either QEMU or libvirt.  So from that POV, the "correct" way to
> stop them would be to find and fix the bug that is preventing them
> being killed.

I wish I'd have thought that way of it while it still occurred.
Thanks a lot for the hint Daniel, now at least everything makes sense.

Next time I see this I know which way to look at it and will gather
debug data - for now it seems unreproducible even in a new test
environment :-/

> Regards,
> Daniel
> --
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-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd