Make upstart job wait for VirtualBox to end gracefully

[valery1707]

This conf works with Ubuntu 12.04 and VirtualBox 4.2:

description "Virtual Machine"

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE=eth0)
stop on runlevel [016]

env vm_uid_or_name=d82c5d45-e113-4332-8de3-51c6251057c8
env vm_comment=some-comment
env uid=username-under-which-vm-was-created

console log

#respawn
#respawn limit 5 10
kill timeout 120

script
    exec sudo -u $uid VBoxHeadless --startvm "$vm_uid_or_name" --comment "$vm_comment"
end script

pre-stop script
    echo "Send ACPI poweroff event to $vm_uid_or_name"
    sudo -u $uid VBoxManage controlvm "$vm_uid_or_name" acpipowerbutton
    echo "Wait while state is 'running'"
    while sudo -u $uid VBoxManage showvminfo "$vm_uid_or_name" | grep -E "State:\s+running" -q
    do
        sleep 0.5s
    done
    echo "Complite ACPI waiting"
end script

[tombert]

I know it is already solved, but my upstart configuration and two scripts here do gracefully shutdown even on reboot, shutdown or power-button events:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/10129.../278705#278705

See the post from tombert.

[tombert]

This conf works with Ubuntu 12.04 and VirtualBox 4.2:

description "Virtual Machine"

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE=eth0)
stop on runlevel [016]

env vm_uid_or_name=d82c5d45-e113-4332-8de3-51c6251057c8
env vm_comment=some-comment
env uid=username-under-which-vm-was-created

console log

#respawn
#respawn limit 5 10
kill timeout 120

script
    exec sudo -u $uid VBoxHeadless --startvm "$vm_uid_or_name" --comment "$vm_comment"
end script

pre-stop script
    echo "Send ACPI poweroff event to $vm_uid_or_name"
    sudo -u $uid VBoxManage controlvm "$vm_uid_or_name" acpipowerbutton
    echo "Wait while state is 'running'"
    while sudo -u $uid VBoxManage showvminfo "$vm_uid_or_name" | grep -E "State:\s+running" -q
    do
        sleep 0.5s
    done
    echo "Complite ACPI waiting"
end script

This script power-offs the machine immediately since upstart is sending the SIGTERM to the process. After the timeout it send the SIGKILL.
You can improve it by adding:

kill signal SIGCONT

Also the acpipowerbutton does not work reliably always since Windows might show the shutdown confirmation dialog preventing from shutdown. You could improve this by sending the shutdown directly to the guest using guestcontrol.

Next I would recommend running the stop script before entering the runlevel 0, which could be solved by using:

stop on starting rc RUNLEVEL=[!2]