Re: [PATCH manager v1 1/1] api: startall: print info message if guest is skipped due to no onboot

["Michael Köppl" <m.koeppl@proxmox.com>]

On Mon Mar 2, 2026 at 3:09 PM CET, Fiona Ebner wrote:
> Am 02.03.26 um 2:49 PM schrieb Michael Köppl:
>> The documentation states that startall only starts guests with
>> onboot=1 by default, and that this behavior can be overridden using the
>> force parameter. However, when startall is invoked via the pvenode CLI
>> without the force parameter, the Bulk Start task silently completes with
>> just "TASK OK", giving no indication of why certain VMs were not started.
>> The added informational message addresses this by clearly communicating
>> to users why those VMs were skipped.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Michael Köppl <m.koeppl@proxmox.com>
>> ---
>> I encountered this while using startall and stopall myself and while
>> RTFM would indeed have helped, I still felt that an informational
>> message would improve the user's experience, especially since stopall
>> will stop all VMs without force=1, whereas startall requires the force
>> param. I only added the informational messages and did not change any
>> behavior because the behavior makes sense to me after thinking about
>> it some more.
>> 
>>  PVE/API2/Nodes.pm | 7 ++++++-
>>  1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>> 
>> diff --git a/PVE/API2/Nodes.pm b/PVE/API2/Nodes.pm
>> index 5bd6fe492..3faa1e800 100644
>> --- a/PVE/API2/Nodes.pm
>> +++ b/PVE/API2/Nodes.pm
>> @@ -1969,7 +1969,12 @@ sub get_start_stop_list {
>>      my $resList = {};
>>      foreach my $vmid (keys %$vmlist) {
>>          my $conf = $vmlist->{$vmid}->{conf};
>> -        next if $autostart && !$conf->{onboot};
>> +
>> +        if ($autostart && !$conf->{onboot}) {
>> +            print
>> +                "skipping $vmid because 'onboot' is not set in guest config, use 'force' parameter to override\n";
>> +            next;
>> +        }
>
> I think printing it for every single guest without onboot is too much,
> because there could be thousands of such guests. One message at the
> beginning of the API call should be enough.
>

Yeah, I wasn't entirely sure printing it for every guest is a good idea
either. Thanks for the feedback. I guess something like "skipping guests
without 'onboot' set in guest config, use 'force' param to override"
once at the beginning?

> And I feel like the invocation from pve-guests.service should not have
> such a message end up in syslog to avoid confusion. It uses
> /usr/bin/pvesh --nooutput create /nodes/localhost/startall
> so maybe this is already the case. Could you check?
>

I agree, but --nooutput does not seem to prevent this. I'll have a look
how this can be avoided.

> Maybe for PVE 10 it could be flipped around with an explicit 'boot' flag
> to indicate that the invocation is the one for boot-up?

I think that would make sense. AFAIK we already try to avoid negation in
names for newer params? It would also make it a lot clearer in the
implementation that these invocations are treated differently.

>
>>  
>>          my $startup =
>>              $conf->{startup} ? PVE::JSONSchema::pve_parse_startup_order($conf->{startup}) : {};