[Feature Request] Respect in-VM Reboot commands

shantyspruce · May 4, 2026, 9:31pm

I searched GitHub issues and didn’t find this, but I had to skim because I didn’t know how to properly narrow my search. I may have missed an existing issue.

Currently, if you tell a VM to reboot inside the VM, i.e. in a VM terminal typing # reboot, then it will shutdown but not start back up. I would like Qubes to differentiate a VM shutting down and power the VM back up when a reboot is issued in-vm.

rustybird · May 5, 2026, 10:05am

github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues

Make in-VM reboot request actually restart the VM

opened 01:48AM - 12 May 23 UTC

marmarek

C: core P: default

[How to file a helpful issue](https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/issue-tracking/) #…## The problem you're addressing (if any) R4.2 ### The solution you'd like Make executing reboot from within a VM actually restart such VM. This requires qubesd to handle the restarting all the relevant daemons (qrexec, qubesdb etc). That's also the time to reload VM configuration (maxmem, color etc). Due to that, libvirt should likely remain configured to `<on_reboot>destroy</on_reboot>`, but qubesd should react on shutdown reason in the libvirt event. This may be opt-in feature (enabled with qvm-features or qvm-prefs). ### The value to a user, and who that user might be Currently when executing "reboot" within a VM, it is actually shut down. This is especially annoying for Windows VMs which do perform reboot from time to time (some updates, etc).

qubist · May 5, 2026, 4:41pm

I could be wrong but assuming the default passwordless root this can be a security problem.

An opt-in as suggested on GH is a good idea.

shantyspruce · May 13, 2026, 9:33pm

Thanks. I did try to search for it, but with the keywords being basically ‘vm’ and ‘reboot’ I found everything but that. Thank you for bringing ti to my attention.

I agree. I thought about it permitting DoS, but not hard enough to realize that it would actually be quite effective if you aren’t technically inclined.