Home / server / Questions / 941535
Accepted
LetMeSOThat4U
Asked: 2018-11-26 04:42:18 +0800 CST

Systemd - running custom VM shutdown script before the standard libvirt-guests.service

  • 772

On a KVM host I have a few VMs with legacy OSes that do not listen to ACPI shutdown event. As it happens on Debian 9.5 host, on shutdown the libvirt-guests.service waits for 5 minutes for each such VM and then destroys it.

In order to avoid that and shut them down cleanly, I have created custom VM shutdown service, with a script that uses special methods to shut them down:

% cat /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vm_stop.service 

[Unit]
Description=vm_shutdown
Before=libvirt-guests.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/true
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/vm_shutdown_all.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

However, on shutdown the service appears to run after libvirt-guests.service in spite of the Before= settings in above service.

Now, I have tested that the custom service actually does run on shutdown - it touches a test file where I can verify it.

The problem: how do I ensure that it runs before libvirt-guests.service?

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The Before= statement relates to the start up of the service. From man systemd.unit.

    If a unit foo.service contains a setting Before=bar.service and both units are being started, bar.service's start-up is delayed until foo.service has finished starting up.
    ...
    Note that when two units with an ordering dependency between them are shut down, the inverse of the start-up order is applied. i.e. if a unit is configured with After= on another unit, the former is stopped before the latter if both are shut down.

    So you want to configure your service with After=libvirt-guests.service as the service then is started after libvirt-guests.service is started and your service is stopped before libvirt-guests.service is stopped.

    • 2