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  • Luiz Capitulino's avatar
    qemu-ga: add guest-suspend-disk · 11d0f125
    Luiz Capitulino authored
    
    
    As the command name implies, this command suspends the guest to disk.
    
    The suspend operation is implemented by two functions: bios_supports_mode()
    and guest_suspend(). Both functions are generic enough to be used by
    other suspend modes (introduced by next commits).
    
    Both functions will try to use the scripts provided by the pm-utils
    package if it's available. If it's not available, a manual method,
    which consists of directly writing to '/sys/power/state', will be used.
    
    To reap terminated children, a new signal handler is installed in the
    parent to catch SIGCHLD signals and a non-blocking call to waitpid()
    is done to collect their exit statuses. The statuses, however, are
    discarded.
    
    The approach used to query the guest for suspend support deserves some
    explanation. It's implemented by bios_supports_mode() and shown below:
    
      qemu-ga
         |
     create pipe
         |
       fork()
         -----------------
         |               |
         |               |
         |             fork()
         |               --------------------------
         |               |                        |
         |               |                        |
         |               |               exec('pm-is-supported')
         |               |
         |              wait()
         |       write exit status to pipe
         |              exit
         |
      read pipe
    
    This might look complex, but the resulting code is quite simple.
    The purpose of that approach is to allow qemu-ga to reap its children
    (semi-)automatically from its SIGCHLD handler.
    
    Implementing this the obvious way, that's, doing the exec() call from
    the first child process, would force us to introduce a more complex way
    to reap qemu-ga's children. Like registering PIDs to be reaped and
    having a way to wait for them when returning their exit status to
    qemu-ga is necessary. The approach explained above avoids that complexity.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLuiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
    11d0f125