[lxc-devel] startup scripts for lxc containers?

[Michael Tokarev]

I wonder how lxc containers are supposed to be
started up and shut down during (host) system
startup/shutdown?  I mean, are there any plans
of this sort, or is it a task for some other
tools such as virt-manager?

I'm about to put lxc on production (for isolation
so far, in order to have different build environments
and test systems, not for security or somesuch), and
am writing startup scripts, but so far found the
whole lot isn't quite uesable as is.

For example, the 4 most importanrt (to me so far) issues
are:

  o lack of "console", there's no clean way to redirect
    container's console to some file.  Maybe bind-mounting
    /dev/console to something else will do the trick but
    some utils checks if /dev/console is actually a char
    device and not a regular file.

  o daemon mode (-d) of lxc-start is almost unusable in this
    context, because it _closes_ all filedescriptors, incl.
    any (error) output of the container and even its own (!)
    error output (this is visible in strace, writing to
    fd#2 gives EBADF).  This is just informational issue,
    that is, while lxc-start's -d is wrong, setsid(1) works
    just fine.

  o no way to shut down a container.  This has already been
    mentioned, but it's still a main issue.  All the suggested
    so far ways (which are basically boils down to connecting
    to the container using some "external" means like ssh,
    sending "shutdown" command, waiting for all the processes
    to exit and finally using lxc-stop) are too clumsy to be
    useful.  For now, since all my containers aren't very
    sensitive to "unexpected" abort, I just run lxc-stop.
    But if some task(s) needs to be done inside before
    stopping - like shutting down a database - it will be
    more difficult.

Any comments on all this?

Thanks!

/mjt