libvirt users - Feb 2010 - pre/post vm start commands

Hi there,

for development i use a windows vm. which is installed into a disk 
image. because the compiler generates a lot of temporary files into the 
user tempdir (C:\\Documents And Users\\User\\Local Settings\\Temp) the 
vm becomes quite slow after a couple of weeks and i register a lot 
activity on the disk.
so i moved the temp directory to a ram disk and no more problems.

but because the ram disk is not formated on startup i need to do this by 
hand. so i disabled autostart for the vm and do the following:

$ sudo mkfs.ntfs -q -L TEMP -I /dev/ram0
$ sudo virsh start windows

so the question is, does libvirt provide some kind of pre startup script 
which is will be executed before the libvirtd does the autostart for the vm.
-- 
Best Regards
Soeren

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 06:26:02PM +0100, Soeren Grunewald
wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> for development i use a windows vm. which is installed into a disk 
> image. because the compiler generates a lot of temporary files into the 
> user tempdir (C:\\Documents And Users\\User\\Local Settings\\Temp) the 
> vm becomes quite slow after a couple of weeks and i register a lot 
> activity on the disk.
> so i moved the temp directory to a ram disk and no more problems.
> 
> but because the ram disk is not formated on startup i need to do this by 
> hand. so i disabled autostart for the vm and do the following:
> 
> $ sudo mkfs.ntfs -q -L TEMP -I /dev/ram0
> $ sudo virsh start windows
> 
> so the question is, does libvirt provide some kind of pre startup script 
> which is will be executed before the libvirtd does the autostart for the
vm.
No, there's no explicit hook for that. Given your description of the
setup you have, I'm wondering why you don't just format the NTFS 
partition inside your windows guest as the first step of your build
process, or upon Windows startup. Using Windows' native NTFS formatting
tool rather than the linux mkfs.ntfs reverse engineered one sounds safer
to me anyway

Daniel
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