[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager][PATCH ] Add option to control whether to leave VM running when closing console.

Leonardo Augusto Guimarães Garcia lagarcia at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Tue Jul 2 14:50:22 UTC 2013


On 07/02/2013 06:20 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 02:18:27PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> On 06/28/2013 01:49 PM, Leonardo Garcia wrote:
>>> From: Leonardo Garcia <lagarcia at br.ibm.com>
>>>
>>> It is sometimes counter intuitive for a desktop user that the virtual machine
>>> continues to run when they left the console viewer application. They are used
>>> that when they close an application all the resources being used by it are also
>>> freed up, and from their perspective, the console viewer is just one more
>>> application running.
>> Hmm, I don't know if I buy this. Closing a VNC client window doesn't shut down
>> the remote machine, nor does exiting an SSH connection. And doing virt-manager
>> --uuid <blah> doesn't auto-start an inactive VM so users are forced to
>> recognize this concept IMO.
>>
>> There's also the issue that reliably shutting down a VM in a safe way is hard:
>> shutdown often doesn't do what's expected, and destroy is potentially
>> dangerous. If we just kick off 'shutdown' on exit then the user may not notice
>> for a long time that the VM never shut down.
> FWIW, on exit, GNOME Boxes will  either suspend all VMs, or do a managed
> save on them.  It definitely makes sense from Boxes POV, since it is trying
> not to expose "VM" as concept/object that the user needs to manage. They just
> have a number of operating systems they can interact with.
Yes, that might be more in line with the view I am trying to address.
>
> I think this POV doesn't really make sense to virt-manager though, since it
> is really about exposing virtual machine management. In addition, virt-manager
> is not tied to a single machine, it can manage arbitrary machines & it definitely
> does not make sense to suspend VMs when disconnecting from any remote host.
I might agree with that and I can change the code to be only valid is 
the VM is running locally.
>
>> I think I'd be more comfortable with just recommending a wrapper script if
>> someone really wants this functionality, it's basically:
> I'd suggest that people just use GNOME Boxes if they want this kind of
> UI interaction model for their VMs.  Different use case, different app.
I might not completely agree with that. One of the issues I see with the 
open source tools is that we have too many tools to do almost the same 
thing. I understand and believe that choice is good, but sometimes we 
are just replicating too much work IMHO. And end users not always 
understand that.

Best regards,

Leonardo Garcia
>
> Daniel




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