VirtualBox: cannot kill machine when it hangs

[ehazlett]

If the VM goes into an un-reachable state (i.e. unable to ssh) then machine just hangs on any command including kill. We should remove anything preventing the kill operation so users can recover (i.e. calls to GetState etc).

Thx to @rrarunan for reporting!

[ghost]

I used a fork bomb to simulate non reponsiveness. From what I'm seeing, executing: /usr/bin/VBoxManage showvminfo test-machine --machinereadable is being continuously looped instead of running controlvm test-machine acpipowerbutton next which most likely wouldn't have worked anyway. It would make sense for Kill to run controlvm test-machine poweroff for hard shutdown and add force restart flag to run controlvm test-machine reset

[nathanleclaire]

Yes, so probably VirtualBox driver needs a "meaner" kill.

[nathanleclaire]

I'm not sure what more can be done about this one. Kill in the VBox driver already calls VBoxManage controlvm foo poweroff.