[Qemu-devel] qemu leaving unix sockets behind after VM is shut down

[Chris Friesen]

When running qemu with something like this

-device virtio-serial \
-chardev socket,path=/tmp/foo,server,nowait,id=foo \
-device virtserialport,chardev=foo,name=host.port.0

the VM starts up as expected and creates a socket at /tmp/foo as expected.

However, when I shut down the VM the socket at /tmp/foo is left behind 
in the filesystem.  Basically qemu has "leaked" a file.

With something like OpenStack where we could be creating/destroying many 
VMs this could end up creating a significant number of files in the 
specified directory.

Has any thought been given to either automatically cleaning up the unix 
socket in the filesystem when qemu exits, or else supporting the 
abstract namespace for unix sockets to allow for automatic cleanup?

Chris