Skip to content

Mac sleep behavior

Running Slicer for Mac on a laptop means host sleep can affect VM lifecycle. Set sleep_action inside each host group in slicer-mac.yaml (slicer and sbox blocks):

  - name: slicer
    count: 1
    share_home: "~/"
    sleep_action: prevent
  - name: sbox
    count: 0
    sleep_action: prevent

On a Mac, sleep can start when:

  • the screen goes dark after idle time,
  • you close the laptop lid,
  • you choose Sleep from the Apple menu,
  • scheduled wake/sleep policies or power settings trigger it.

sleep_action options

  • none: no explicit action.
  • shutdown: request VM shutdown on host sleep.
  • prevent: keep macOS awake while VMs are running.
  • suspend: snapshot VM state and restore on wake.

What happens

Sleep event

  • shutdown: request clean VM shutdown.
  • suspend: write snapshot state and stop the VM (fallback to shutdown if snapshot is unavailable).
  • none / prevent: no shutdown or snapshot action.

Wake event

  • suspend: on wake, wait 5 seconds for the system to settle, then run state-aware restore.
  • none, shutdown, prevent: no restore action.