[libvirt] udevadm settle can take too long

[Jim Paris]

Hi,

http://bugs.debian.org/663931 is a bug I'm hitting, where virt-manager
times out on the initial connection to libvirt.

The basic problem is that, while checking storage volumes,
virt-manager causes libvirt to call "udevadm settle".  There's an
interaction where libvirt's earlier use of network namespaces (to probe
LXC features) had caused some uevents to be sent that get filtered out
before they reach udev.  This confuses "udevadm settle" a bit, and so
it sits there waiting for a 2-3 minute built-in timeout before returning.
Eventually libvirtd prints:
  2012-04-22 18:22:18.678+0000: 30503: warning : virKeepAliveTimer:182 : No response from client 0x7feec4003630 after 5 keepalive messages in 30 seconds
and virt-manager prints:
  2012-04-22 18:22:18.931+0000: 30647: warning : virKeepAliveSend:128 : Failed to send keepalive response to client 0x25004e0
and the connection gets dropped.

One workaround could be to specify a shorter timeout when doing the
settle.  The patch appended below allows virt-manager to work,
although the connection still has to wait for the 10 second timeout
before it succeeds.  I don't know what a better solution would be,
though.  It seems the udevadm behavior might not be considered a bug
from the udev/kernel point of view:
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/22/60

I'm using Linux 3.2.14 with libvirt 0.9.11.  You can trigger the
udevadm issue using a program I posted at the Debian bug report link
above.

-jim

>From 17e5b9ebab76acb0d711e8bc308023372fbc4180 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jim Paris <jim at jtan.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:35:47 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] shorten udevadmin settle timeout

Otherwise, udevadmin settle can take so long that connections from
e.g. virt-manager will get closed.
---
 src/util/util.c |    4 ++--
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/util/util.c b/src/util/util.c
index 6e041d6..dfe458e 100644
--- a/src/util/util.c
+++ b/src/util/util.c
@@ -2593,9 +2593,9 @@ virFileFindMountPoint(const char *type ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED)
 void virFileWaitForDevices(void)
 {
 # ifdef UDEVADM
-    const char *const settleprog[] = { UDEVADM, "settle", NULL };
+    const char *const settleprog[] = { UDEVADM, "settle", "--timeout", "10", NULL };
 # else
-    const char *const settleprog[] = { UDEVSETTLE, NULL };
+    const char *const settleprog[] = { UDEVSETTLE, "--timeout", "10", NULL };
 # endif
     int exitstatus;
 
-- 
1.7.7