[lxc-devel] Shutting down containers properly

[Ward, David - 0663 - MITLL]

On 25/05/12 10:40, Christian Seiler wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> my lxc management script uses lxc-stop just for an emergency action
>> called "fored-stop" and it will be also applied, if a normal "stop"
>> (alias "halt") action will timeout after 5min. For this normal
>> shutdown (or reboot) of a container, I'm sending just a SIGPWR (or
>> SIGINT) to the containers init (sysvinit) process. This will result
>> into the same actions as one will call 'poweroff' or 'reboot' inside
>> it.
>
> Yes, obviously that also works, but then you need to manually update
> the inittab of a container and rewire reboot/power failure actions to
> cause a shutdown as you describe.
>
> I'd really prefer shutting down a container just worked out of the box
> without any strange modifications to /etc/inittab for sysvinit. I
> really think shutting down containers properly is a functionality that
> LXC should support out of the box.
>

Actually I believe the burden here ought to be on the container to 
handle SIGPWR properly...not on lxc to get involved in dealing with 
subtleties between different init systems that might be running in a 
container.

(And yes, upstart handles SIGPWR with the 'power-status-changed' event: 
see http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/upstart_cookbook.pdf )

If existing distros don't handle SIGPWR, then why don't we just modify 
the lxc-template so that it does?  Or even fix the distro itself so that 
it does?

David

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