This hasn’t happened to me yet but I was just thinking about it. Let’s say you have a server with an iGPU, and you use GPU passthrough to let VMs use the iGPU. And then one day the host’s ssh server breaks, maybe you did something stupid or there was a bad update. Are you fucked? How could you possibly recover, with no display and no SSH? The only thing I can think of is setting up serial access for emergencies like this, but I rarely hear about serial access nowadays so I wonder if there’s some other solution here.
I just have a boot entry that doesn’t do the passthrough, doesn’t bind to vfio-pci and doesn’t start the VMs on boot so I can inspect and troubleshoot.
That sounds brilliant. Have any resources to learn how to do something like this? I’ve never created custom boot entries before
I use systemd-boot so it was pretty easy, and it should be similar in GRUB:
title My boot entry that starts the VM
linux /vmlinuz-linux-zen
initrd /amd-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux-zen.img
options quiet splash root=ZSystem/linux/archlinux rw pcie_aspm=off iommu=on systemd.unit=qemu-vms.target
What you want is that part: systemd.unit=qemu-vms.target which tells systemd which target to boot to. I launch my VMs with scripts so I have the qemu-vms.target and it depends on the VMs I want to autostart. A target is a set of services to run for a desired system state, the default usually being graphical or multi-user, but really it can be anything, and use whatever set of services you want: start network, don’t start network, mount drives, don’t mount drives, entirely up to you.
https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.target.5.en
You can also see if there’s a predefined rescue target that fits your need and just goes to a local console: https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.special.7.en
