Shutting down a VM when applications close

[tetra...@danwin1210.me]

DispVMs shut down automatically when the launched application closes.

Is it possible to enable this for certain applications in certain AppVMs
as well?

For example I may not want my "resource-heavy-apps-vm" to keep running
after MemoryHungryApp closes, because that ties up half my system RAM.

How would I configure "resource-heavy-apps-vm" to shutdown automatically
when MemoryHungryApp closes?

[Steve Coleman]

You can try this trick when starting your app/vm:

dom0> qvm-run -a AppVM "resource-heavy-app;shutdown -h now"

When the application closes the next command in line is the shutdown
command, and the VM will simply exit. As long as the app does not
background itself by forking a new process to demonize this will likely
work.

If in testing that command works for you, then you can create a
specialized AppVM.desktop file, and set the Exec= entry to
"resource-heavy-app;shutdown -h now". Once that is done then add that
custom desktop file to your template VM in /usr/share/applications and
you should then be able to add the application directly to your qubes
menu for that specific VM.

[tetra...@danwin1210.me]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 08:16:28AM -0500, Steve Coleman wrote:
>You can try this trick when starting your app/vm:
>
>dom0> qvm-run -a AppVM "resource-heavy-app;shutdown -h now"
>
>When the application closes the next command in line is the shutdown
>command, and the VM will simply exit. As long as the app does not
>background itself by forking a new process to demonize this will
>likely work.
>
>If in testing that command works for you, then you can create a
>specialized AppVM.desktop file, and set the Exec= entry to
>"resource-heavy-app;shutdown -h now". Once that is done then add that
>custom desktop file to your template VM in /usr/share/applications and
>you should then be able to add the application directly to your qubes
>menu for that specific VM.

Thanks!

[lik...@gmx.de]

You could also use a feature of qubes to shutdown a VM after a certain time. You can find steps to enable it to a particular vm in this thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-users/lyABSZGmKdM

Now it also works for debian templates.

[tetra...@danwin1210.me]

Great!