Tuesday, March 22, 2011

How to access the QEMU monitor through libvirt

It is sometimes useful to issue QEMU monitor commands to VMs managed by libvirt. Since libvirt takes control of the monitor socket it is not possible to interact with the QEMU monitor in the same way as when running QEMU or KVM manually.

Daniel Berrange shared the following techniques on IRC a while back. It is actually pretty easy to get at the QEMU monitor even while libvirt is managing the VM:

Method 1: virsh qemu-monitor-command


There is a virsh command available in libvirt ≥0.8.8 that allows you to access the QEMU monitor through virsh:

virsh qemu-monitor-command --hmp <domain> '<command> [...]'

Method 2: Connecting directly to the monitor socket


On older libvirt versions the only option is shutting down libvirt, using the monitor socket directly, and then restarting libvirt:

sudo service libvirt-bin stop  # or "libvirtd" on Red Hat-based distros
sudo nc -U /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/<domain>.monitor
...
sudo service libvirt-bin start

Either way works fine. I hope this is useful for folks troubleshooting QEMU or KVM. In the future I will post more libvirt tips :).

Update: Daniel Berrange adds that using the QEMU monitor essentially voids your libvirt warranty :). Try to only use query commands like info qtree rather than commands that change the state of QEMU like adding/removing devices.
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