[Spice-devel] [vdagent-linux v2 1/2] vdagent: Silently ignore missing spicevmc device

[Christophe Fergeau]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 01:46:21PM +0100, Jakub Janku wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 1:23 PM Christophe Fergeau <cfergeau at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On most distros, spice-vdagent will be autostarted as part of the
> > startup of the desktop environment session. This is done by
> > spice-vdagent.desktop, which has no way of checking if we are in a virt
> > environment with the needed devices present.
> >
> > Currently, if /dev/virtio-ports/com.redhat.spice.0 is missing, we log an
> > error in syslog, and exit with an error exit code. This is too noisy
> > when autostarting it on a bare metal machine which have no use for
> > spice-vdagent. This reverts 0159111b to get rid of these warnings in the
> > session's logs
> >
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/spice/linux/vd_agent/issues/12
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Christophe Fergeau <cfergeau at redhat.com>
> > ---
> > Changes since v1:
> > - switched to g_debug as g_print would show in journalctl
> 
> Why is this wanted? What if the vdagent is running in a virtualized
> system and the device is missing? In that case, I would expect to see
> at least some info in the system journal.
> So why not just lowering the log level to something like LOG_INFO?

I don't know what the expectations are with respect to the amount of
logging in the bare metal case. To be honest, we should not even be
trying to load spice-vdagent in that situation. So logging anything is
just going to be noise.

Rather than silencing the warning, I tried to find other solutions, but
I could not think of anything. We could say we don't want to try to run
spice-vdagent if spice-vdagentd is not running, however these days
spice-vdagentd is socket activated, and it's spice-vdagent which
triggers the actual start of spice-vdagentd.

Then I tried to make use of systemd user session support to start
spice-vdagent rather than relying on /etc/xdg/autostart, however there
were 2 issues that I'm not sure are going to be easy to solve:
- the agent needs an X display, so we need to express in a systemd user
  unit that xorg needs to be running
- I tried a unit file which tries to start spice-vdagent only if the
  needed device is present, but then spice-vdagentd fails to get the session info
  from systemd because spice-vdagent was not run in a 'user session'
  context I guess. We need to know if the spice-vdagent which is running
  is run by the user in the 'active seat', and I have no idea if this
  is compatible with systemd user units...

At this point, I'd just go with this patch

Christophe

> 
> Cheers,
> Jakub
> 
> > - reworded the message
> >
> >  src/vdagent/vdagent.c | 4 ++--
> >  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/src/vdagent/vdagent.c b/src/vdagent/vdagent.c
> > index 90247f9..ff3328c 100644
> > --- a/src/vdagent/vdagent.c
> > +++ b/src/vdagent/vdagent.c
> > @@ -451,8 +451,8 @@ int main(int argc, char *argv[])
> >              LOG_USER);
> >
> >      if (file_test(portdev) != 0) {
> > -        syslog(LOG_ERR, "Cannot access vdagent virtio channel %s", portdev);
> > -        return 1;
> > +        g_debug("vdagent virtio channel %s does not exist, exiting", portdev);
> > +        return 0;
> >      }
> >
> >      if (do_daemonize)
> > --
> > 2.20.1
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Spice-devel mailing list
> > Spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel
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