reboot

I've been asked some questions about a recent change to nova that I am responsible for, and I thought it would be easier to address those in this format than trying to explain what's happening in IRC. That way whenever someone compliments me on possibly the longest unit test name ever written, I can point them here. Let's start with some definitions. What is the difference between a soft reboot and a hard reboot in Nova? The short answer is that a soft reboot gives the operating system running in the instance an opportunity to respond to an ACPI power event gracefully before the rug is pulled out from under the instance, whereas a hard reboot just punches the instance in the face immediately. There is a bit more complexity than that of course, because this is OpenStack. A hard reboot also re-fetches image meta-data, and rebuilds the XML description of the instance that we hand to libvirt. It also re-populates any missing backing files. Finally it ensures that the networking is configured correctly and boots the instance again. In other words, a hard reboot is kind of like an initial instance boot, in that it makes fewer assumptions about…