I get the feeling that the locking manager is meant to be a libvirt-internal API. I'll throw out this idea instead: How about making the concept of "reserving" a VM into a public libvirt API? /* Reserve 'dom'. * * flags: * VIR_DOMAIN_RESERVE_READONLY: reserve for read-only access */ int virDomainReserve (virDomainPtr dom, unsigned flags); /* Drop reservation of 'dom'. */ int virDomainUnReserve (virDomainPtr dom); The reservation would also be dropped when the current libvirt connection is closed. libvirt/libvirtd would acquire the locks on our behalf. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v -- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list