Freddie Cash <fjwcash@gmail.com> writes:

> For everyone's viewing (and critiquing, I guess) pleasure, I present
> my version of a kvmctl script.

Hi. I have a small 'qemu-send' utility for talking to a running qemu/kvm
process whose monitor console listens on a filesystem socket, which I think
might be a useful building block when extending these kinds of script to do
things like migratation, pausing, and so on. The source is attached.

It's careful to extract and pass on the correct command output from kvm and
waits for the (qemu) prompt to return before exiting, so you can do stuff
like

  qemu-send /var/run/vm.ctl migrate file:///var/statedumps/foo
  do-something-with-the-file /var/statedumps/foo

without any race problem, and

  qemu-send /tmp/vm.ctl 'info blockstats'

will list the right info without any extraneous command echo or prompt text
leaking out.

Any comments or feedback welcome, and please feel free to incorporate it
where useful.

> The only thing I haven't been able to figure out, is how to send a
> "shutdown" command from the host OS to the guest OS, such that the
> guest OS will do a proper shutdown sequence.  You have to switch to
> the VM console and manually tell it to shutdown.  :(

If you have the qemu monitor listening on a unix socket /var/run/vm.ctl,
i.e. if you've started the kvm with an argument like

  -monitor unix:/var/run/vm.ctl,server,nowait

you could send a graceful shutdown using

  qemu-send /var/run/vm.ctl system_powerdown

Best wishes,

Chris.