Comment 10 for bug 368962

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 01:44:32PM -0000, Andrew Bolster wrote:
> The severity is a matter opinion, but if several users feel it is severe
> to them, it qualifies as High, as per the provided link.

To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking it seriously that it's
supposedly a severe impediment to anyone. It's /trivial/ to work around
if you know what OS you're running in the guest. Just do whatever you
usually do to shut it down and start it back up again a little while
later.

"Severe impact for a small number of users" is stuff like a few hundred
users of a particular piece of hardware being unable to boot, for
instance, not 5-6 people who feel mildly inconvenienced by something
that takes them all but a few seconds to work around.

In the grand scheme of things, the importance setting is supposed to
work as a tool for developers to decide which bugs to work on. Across
thousands of packages, it's really not very useful to have stuff like
this ranking the same as people's kernels hanging on boot, system
lock-ups, firefox going all weird on upgrades, or whatever.

> As for 'no portable way...to reboot...', most (if not all) OS's
> respect ACPI.

Certainly not all do. That's the problem. That's what "portable" means.
I'm not even sure Ubuntu supports it. I'm rarely near a machine with a
reset button, so can't check, but at least looking at the acpid package,
I don't see anything that causes the system to reboot in response to
/anything/, and specifically I don't see a handler for any sort of
"reset" event.

> And, in a similar vein, if you can walk up to a physical machine, most
> physical machines will gracefully shutdown when the power button is
> pressed, so I don't see your point #6

It's simple, really. "most" != "all", so it fails the "portable"
requirement.

So, imagine we make libvirt send the acpi shutdown event, wait until the
guest has shut down, and then start it again.. What if the OS never
shuts down when you issue the acpi event? Should the call just never
return? Or should it return immediately and just never succeed in
rebooting the guest?

It's really not as simple as you make it out to be, when you have to
care about edge cases.

--
Soren Hansen
Ubuntu Developer
http://www.ubuntu.com/