Preloaded disposables should be refreshed on template updates

[ben-grande]

The problem you're addressing (if any)

Preloaded disposables are unnamed disposables and have the property is_preload set to True. GUI tools ignore updating or marking unnamed disposables as in need of restart. Meaning the disposable that will reflect the current state is preload-dispvm-max + 1, so it is bad for systems using 1 of them but much worse on a large limit.

The solution you'd like

Preloaded disposables should also have indication that it needs to be restarted to reflect the correct state of the system. To refresh the preloads, direct the following call to the disposable template: admin.vm.CreateDisposable+preload-autostart.

The value to a user and who that user might be

When having preloaded disposables, it's outdated state can be reflected in GUI tools such as qui-domains, qube manager and the updater to renew them.

Completion criteria checklist

Every GUI tool that reflects the outdated state of a qube should also apply for preloaded disposables, this includes:

• qube manager
• qui-domains

While tools that trigger the restart of qubes on update should also renew the preloads:

• qubes-update

[ben-grande]

qube manager and qui-domains report if the qube volume is outdated. What is the desired behavior for them?

I'd like to make it easy to refresh preloads from multiple ways that you can see the qube listing, so I'd say that on any preloaded disposable that has an outdated volume, right clicking on the qube would show an option to refresh all preloaded disposables that are outdated. If clicking on the disposable template, it gives an option to refresh its derivatives.

Another option would be that once it detects an outdated volume, it refreshes the preloaded disposables.

Whereas with the qubes update, I believe that preloaded disposables must always be refreshed, without giving option to toggle on settings.

An automated way of refreshing preloaded disposables would be better suited in case of manual changes or management changes (Salt/Ansible) to the template or disposable template, as then it wouldn't require the user to update via qubes update or find the qube on the qube manager or qui-domains to refresh it.

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The new idea proposed by Marta is to always refresh them when outdated. The qube manager and qui-domains do it on template shutdown.