Sometimes errors don’t float to the top of stacks well.

Our virtualization stack is pretty automated wherein we have a custom script that uses vmbuilder to create the guest, register it with libvirt, create first boot scripts that will have it register with a chef server, and start the VM. We saw this error today libvirtError: monitor socket did not show up.: Connection refused, and I commented that my memory contained a lot of libvirt/kvm errors, and many resolutions, but the two don’t always stay connected. I checked the libvirt logs in /var/log/libvirt and even ran libvirt with LIBVIRT_DEBUG=1 libvirtd -v. When I tried running kvm by hand using the syntax in the logs, but with the -net options removed from the command line, kvm just spouted Aborted. After starting at it for a bit, I noticed that instead of -m 1024 KVM was trying to run with -m 1073741824 (1024^3). This was due to a small conversion bug in our custom script.