[Lxc-users] Reboot from container

[Brian K. White]

On 6/18/2010 6:39 PM, John Drescher wrote:
>> I gave a "reboot" command (accidently) from container. Although it did
>> not reboot the system, it made it less functional. All the vtys were
>> closed and could not open any new terminal. Had to reboot the system
>> to make it functional again.
>>
>> Have any one seen such behavior ? This is with 2.6.32 kernel.
>>
>>      
> I believe that was fixed with the latest lxc-0.7.0 release.
>
> John
>    

Well, "fixed" is not fair as it implies anything was ever broken.

LXC never claimed to provide a virtual reboot function in the first place.
LXC is in many ways like chroot. And just like chroot, it's a low level 
tool that you build fancier things on top of. It runs processes in a 
namespace. It is not a full virtual hardware system like vmware. You 
build the fancier higher level stuff on top of that yourself, such as 
modifying the container init scripts fairly heavily to remove or modify 
the stuff that does not work or makes no sense in the context of a 
container. There is no boot loader or kernel or kernel modules for 
instance, so any init scripts that deal with those need to be removed or 
short circuited. And it's not lxc's job to do that, you have to. 
Arranging for the host system to stop & restart a container when the 
container requested a reboot was like that.

Now LXC ships with a reboot service which is a great convenience and 
improvement, but it's not fair to to LXC to call this a fix.

-- 
bkw