Re: How to initiate power-off in quest with new microvm machine type

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 12/11/19 16:48, Sergio Lopez wrote:
> 
> Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 at 15:22, Waldek Kozaczuk <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am referring to the machine type described here - 
>>> https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/docs/microvm.rst. I would like to 
>>> know how to initiate power-off sequence from a guest given that ACPI is not 
>>> available. On firecracker the only way is generating Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard 
>>> event by writing proper value to the keyboard controller port 0xfe like so:
>>>
>>> outb(0x64, 0xfe);
>>>
>>> What is the corresponding mechanism on QEMU with microvm machine?
> 
> To shut down the VM from the guest I can think of two options (that we
> should probably add to the documentation):
> 
>  1. Add "-no-reboot" to the QEMU command line (you'd also need this for
>  the keyboard based method) and trigger a triple fault. If you're
>  running Linux, you can make this the default by passing "reboot=t" to
>  the kernel command line.
> 
>  2. Add an isa-debug-exit device and write to its port in a similar way
>  you do with the keyboard. There's no need for adding "-no-reboot" to
>  the command line, as this will cause QEMU to exit immediately.
> 
> That said, we can easily add a knob for attaching a i8042 keyboard to
> the microvm machine type. I'm not entirely convinced that this is really
> necessary, but if it makes people's life easier, it may be worth it.

I think we should rather add a minimal i8042 device that can only do
reset (but wouldn't be detected as i8042 by the guest).  But if reboot=t
works, we could also add it to the automatically-generated command line.

Paolo