Re: [Tails-dev] QEmu guest agent in tails builder

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Author: Arnaud
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] QEmu guest agent in tails builder

On 04/22/2017 06:16 PM, anonym wrote:
> Arnaud:
>> Dear Tails,
>>
>> I'd like to propose a little improvement to the Tails Builder VM.
>>
>> My use-case is that I build Tails locally on my laptop. My concern is a
>> little lack of convenience: if ever I forget to close the Tails Builder
>> VM (using `rake vm:halt`) after I'm done, the laptop gets stuck at
>> shutdown. I can see these log messages:
>>
>>     libvirt-guests.sh: Waiting for guest xxx to shut down, 300 seconds left
>>     libvirt-guests.sh: Waiting for guest xxx to shut down, 295 seconds left
>>     ...
> Another way to work around this is to set `SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT=0` in `/etc/default/libvirt-guests`.


Yeah I'm not a big fan of that since it's a dirty shutdown. I'm already
struggling enough with the builds, I don't want to add this kind of
additional questions, like: "Is my build failing again because somehow
my VM is corrupted because of these continuous unclean shutdowns ?
Alright, just in case, let's destroy it and start all over again".

Then it's two more hours waiting...

Although it's a possible solution for sure, you're right to mention it.

> If the fix I proposed above isn't good enough for you, I suggest you wait and return to this issue in a few months -- there's an ongoing rework of how we use Vagrant which moves in the direction where each build will start with a completely fresh (first boot) builder VM, and whenever a build finishes (success or not) the VM is immediately destroyed and undefined. So I think your problem will just go away once this work is merged into our main branches. Fair enough?


Alright I didn't know that. This will indeed solve the problem. Be sure
to include an easy way to see the logs when a build fails, and to let
the VM alive so that one can log in and investigate ;)

I guess this rework implies that you move `apt-cacher-ng out of the
builder, right ? Do you plan to include it in another VM, or you will
just remove it completely, and let people handle it by themselves ?

Cheers !

Arnaud