Opened 5 years ago
Last modified 5 years ago
#18893 new enhancement
Enhancement: CLI flag to sleep host for N seconds
| Reported by: | mcandre | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | other | Version: | VirtualBox 6.0.10 |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Guest type: | other | Host type: | all |
Description
Some legacy operating systems such as OS/2 Warp require floppy diskettes to be inserted before being bootable, with corresponding delays for the data to load. Unfortunately, automation frameworks like Packer do not currently provide a way for the host to sleep during these data loads.
Fortunately, Packer does provide a "vboxmanage" section in its configuration, where subcommands like "modifyvm", "storagectl", etc. can be triggered. Could VBoxManage get a command line option to sleep for N seconds, so that automated VM builds can successfully boot these legacy operating system guests?
E.g., VBoxManage sleep <seconds> would suffice.
Change History (3)
comment:1 by , 5 years ago
comment:2 by , 5 years ago
So, let me get this straight...
- You're running several "
VBoxManage" commands in a script. - And that script doesn't have a "
sleep" or "pause" option?!? - And you want VirtualBox to provide that functionality?
Why do I have the feeling that you're barking up the wrong tree? You should be looking at the script side, methinks...


Related:
VBoxManage guestproperty wait <uuid> goodnight-moon --timeout <milliseconds>
behaves similar to the desired host sleep command. However, should this command ever change behavior in the future, then it would not be such a good match.
For example, if the exit code zero were to change to non-zero upon timeout, then it would be harder to chain together multiple VBoxManage commands in a larger script. Also, if the guestproperty wait subcommand later breaks on missing VirtualBox guest drivers, then the timeout might not trigger the same way. Finally, if the guest actually does feature a "goodnight-moon" property pattern, then this command would not delay the host.
For these reasons, it would be best to offer a dedicated host sleep subcommand, for use in large VBoxManage... scripts.