Leftover lock file after host shutdown

[eofster]

When shutdown -r now is executed on the host, the lock file remains present on the guest when the host restarts. This behavior is flaky, sometimes it does get removed. I suspect, when it happens, it happens only to the VMs that are not in vm_list. From what I saw in the sources, the vm_delay is used when stopping VMs from the list and not used for the VMs not in the list. Maybe it's a race condition during shutdown.

FreeBSD 14.2, vm-bhyve 1.6.2.

[metalefty]

Hi, I've also seen that. I'll look into that when I have time.

[eofster]

As far as I understand, lock files won't be removed after power outage and the VMs won't start after the host is up again. Is there an option to clean the lock files on boot somewhere? Seems to be a critical part of running unattended VM servers.

[eofster]

Oh, I think what I wrote in the previous message is not true. The lock files of the same hostname do get ignored after an unclean shutdown. Here it compares if "${_skip_lock}" != "1" and here it always sets it to "1".

[akrivulya]

If a lock file remains in the system during a normal reboot process, it means that the virtual machines do not have time to complete their work due to init(8) timeout. Try to adjust rc.conf(5) variable rcshutdown_timeout and sysctl(8) variable kern.init_shutdown_timeout. Also if you have Windows Server guests enable "Shutdown: Allow system to be shut down without having to log on" policy, which is disabled by default in Server versions.

[GogoFC]

Lock files are there to prevent VMs booting on different hosts. Obviously you can delete them and VMs will boot. I found out about this after changing the hostname of my machine few years back. This is helpful in VM migration, backup etc so that you don't have two clones running. That's what I know about the idea from what I was told. VMs will show locked in vm list until you start them and they will start and the lock file will be removed if on the correct host. I guess I wrote this because I personally don't see any problems with it.

[metalefty]

I think @akrivulya provided an answer for this.