Daemon behavior

This specification covers some of the LXD daemon’s behavior.

Startup

On every start, LXD checks that its directory structure exists. If it doesn’t, it creates the required directories, generates a key pair and initializes the database.

Once the daemon is ready for work, LXD scans the instances table for any instance for which the stored power state differs from the current one. If an instance’s power state was recorded as running and the instance isn’t running, LXD starts it.

Signal handling

SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGTERM

For those signals, LXD assumes that it’s being temporarily stopped and will be restarted at a later time to continue handling the instances.

The instances will keep running and LXD will close all connections and exit cleanly.

SIGPWR

Indicates to LXD that the host is going down.

LXD will attempt a clean shutdown of all the instances. After 30 seconds, it kills any remaining instance.

The instance power_state in the instances table is kept as it was so that LXD can restore the instances as they were after the host is done rebooting.

SIGUSR1

Write a memory profile dump to the file specified with --memprofile.