Kenneth Tanzer ktanzer@desc.org writes:
It really honestly seems to me that sometimes I was getting inconsistent results, at least vis a vis the _current_ state of configuration files. Also, I've had situations where I've been unable to destory machines from the graphical virt-manager, but able to do so with xm. Yesterday, I had a guest that didn't show up on an xm list, but showed up in the virt-manager, constantly toggling between running and stopped.
xm and the virt-manager tools are different. I would suggest either always using one or always using the other.
My questions are:
- whether either xm or virt-manager do any kind of caching of
settings, so that your current configuration might not actually be what is executed?
libvirt (virt-manager) does use a different config file, and can convert from the xm config format (I don't know if it does this automatically or if it uses the xm config file unchanged or what.) to the libvirt xml format. I would suggest you either use the libvirt/virt-manager tools, or the xm tools, but don't switch between them on the same installation, especially for guest startup. It's easy to get confused as to config file locations.
if you want to use the libvirt tools on the command line, the tool you want is virsh.
(personally, I use the xm tools, because I am more interested in Xen than RedHat, though I am currently running Xen on CentOS. I will, in fact, be abandoning the redhat xen kernels on my next servers so I get PVGRUB. )
- does going through the xen / grub boot process do any kind of
changing or writing of settings? Again, I swear there were times where I got different results on the second boot than the first one.
Pygrub is read-only, as far as I know. It should not change your config file or guest disk.
- finally, what would account for the differences between
virt-manager and xm, and also is there any magic way to destroy an un-destroyable machine without having to reboot your computer?
'xm destroy' has worked fine for me for some time. I think it's been more than a year since I've been unable to kill a zombie. Are you running a recent kernel?