Another Xen Bug

Seems this has been tormenting several people out there. At first I thought it was a problem with running Windows XP under Xen, but it seems to be bigger than that. All of a sudden Xen guests won't shutdown. They act as if they are going to shutdown, but the console never disconnects.

I can close the console, but virt-manager still shows the guest to be running. If I attempt to start the guest it fails, as it thinks it is running. Rebooting Dom0 fixes the problem. Not the preferred way of doing things.

Since I could replicate the problem on demand, I started both a Solaris 10 and Windows XP guest, and opened both in a separate Xen console. Without disconnecting the console, I issued poweroff from within the Solaris console. As expected, the Solaris guest hung.

From a Linux root terminal, I bounced Xen:

# service xend restart

The Windows XP guest was unaffected, and the Solaris guest was unlocked. Problem solved. Granted, not the best solution, but it should work until the next bug fix.