[libvirt] [PATCH] Introduce virt-console

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 01:56:56PM +0000, John Levon wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 01:52:08PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> > > Solaris policy is not to introduce plumbing into the user's PATH.
> > > virt-console is undocumented and there is no advantage to running it
> > > directly. If it were in PATH we would have to document it, and we have
> > > no intention of doing that...
> > 
> > I'll volunteer to write a manual page for virt-console, since even
> > existing manpage for 'virsh console' is non-existant.
> 
> Hmm, I thought we'd picked up our virsh man page from upstream. But, I
> don't see it there.
> 
> > > > We need to add an explicit argument to turn on the automatic
> > > > reconnect of VMs when they reboot. Existing apps calling
> > > > virsh console rely on its current semantics which are to
> > > > exit upon domain reboot and we can't break them
> > > 
> > > We argued about this last time. Looks like we'll have to keep this
> > > change private, and let Linux users suffer. Oh well :)
> > 
> > You explicitly break virt-install by doing this.
> 
> Break how?

It relies on virsh console exiting when the domain shuts down.

> > Have virt-console provide the more sensible default auto-reconnect
> > semantics, and make 'virsh console' call it with a flag to turn
> > this off to preserve existing semantics & not break users like
> > virt-install.
> 
> This is horrible IMHO - the user has to run some strange command instead
> of virsh like they use for everything else? I'd rather not
> auto-reconnect than this.

Its not so strange in the context of all the other virt commands we
have, in particular in relation to virt-viewer

  virt-viewer  - graphical console
  virt-console - text console
  virt-top
  virt-df
  virt-manager
  virt-install
  ...etc..

If anything, virsh is the odd one out.

Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|