Upcoming switch to the core18 base for the Multipass snap

Hello All!

Some exciting news is that the Multipass snap will be switching over to the core18 base soon (hopefully next week)!

However, in testing this switchover, it has brought some pain for instances that have been suspended using the current snap (such as when the snap refreshes with running instances) and then trying to resume these instances using the new core18 base snap.

We were able to find a solution when the default QEMU driver is being used, so nothing needs to be done by the user. However, when the LIBVIRT driver is being used, it’s a different story. We simply could not find a way to make it seamless to the user :frowning:

The best case to avoid this is to stop any running instances before the snap refreshes, but we all know we don’t have any control over when the snap refreshes :slight_smile:

As such, we have to employ a manual workaround in order to recover for this scenario.

When trying to start a suspended instance, the Multipass daemon will detect the problem and notify the client and the client will display the steps on how to recover. I will also put those steps here:

  1. snap refresh multipass --channel core16/beta
  2. multipass start <instance_name>
  3. Save any data in the instance
  4. multipass stop <instance_name>
  5. snap refresh multipass --channel beta (or edge)
  6. multipass start <instance_name>

Apologies for any inconveniences this may cause.

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