I'm tracking down a image corruption issue and I'm curious if you can
answer the following:
1) Is there any difference between sending a "TERM" signal to the QEMU
process and typing "quit" at the monitor?
2) Will sending TERM corrupt the 'gcow2' image (in ways other than
normal guest OS dirty shutdown)?
3) Assuming I always start QEMU using "-loadvm", is there any risk in
using 'kill' to send SIGTERM to the QMEU process when done?
I notice the entire implementation of "do_quit()" is simply:
static void do_quit(void)
{
exit(0);
}
So I don't see any special shutdown sequence being invoked, and I can't
find any atexit() handler that's used in the general case. Thus it
would seem to me that just killing the process should be the same as
calling "quit" via the monitor.
(I also can't find a signal handler for SIGTERM, but I might have missed
it.)
Furthermore, if I understand "-loadvm" correctly, then any change made
by the guest OS (including any corruption of the image caused by a dirty
shutdown) should be blown away on the next restart.
Thus it seems that I should be able to safely start QEMU with -loadvm,
do my thing inside the guest OS, and then just "kill" the host process,
again and again and again, without any risk of accumulated corruption.
Is this correct, or am I misunderstanding this?
I ask because I seem to be getting accumulated corruption in my guest
OS, but it's not totally reproducible. Just trying to make sure QEMU
works as it does to narrow down the debugging options.
Thanks!
-david
