what does "virsh destroy" really ?

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 09:15:57AM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 07:12:34PM -0400, Digimer wrote:
> > On 2020-10-05 6:04 p.m., Lentes, Bernd wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > what does "virsh destroy" with the domain ? Send a kill -9 to the process ?
> > > 
> > > Bernd
> > > 
> > 
> > It forces the guest off, like pulling the power on a hardware machine.
> > Not sure of the exact mechanism behind the scenes. It does leave the
> > server defined and you can reboot it again later (albeit like restoring
> > power to a normal machine, so it might need to replay journals, etc).
> > 
> 
> The technical details should not matter, but it tries to send "quit" to QEMU and
> falls back to killing it IIRC (firsh with SIGTERM and then with SIGKILL).  Don't
> do that if you want to use the machine again ;-)

You don't need to be so scared of virsh destroy. It is simply akin to pulling
out the power plug, and modern OS with a decent journaling filesystem will
recover from that quite reasonably. Sure you'll loose state of what's running,
but 99% of the time your guest will boot up again just fine.

Regards,
Daniel
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