limactl start prevents the terminal from closing after the shell exits

[pcrock-thmdo]

Disclaimer: An AI helped me debug this. I massaged it a bit by hand though.

Steps

1. In kitty (a terminal that closes on pty EOF), run limactl start <instance>.
2. exit.

The shell exits and is reaped, but the kitty terminal window stays open.

Observations

• lsof /dev/pts/N and sudo fuser /dev/pts/N show no holder of the pty.
• kill $(pgrep -x qemu-system-x86) releases the pty; the window closes immediately.
• Redirecting limactl start's stdio (</dev/null >log 2>&1) does not change the behavior.
• setsid limactl start <instance> avoids it; the window closes on exit.

Environment

• lima: 2.1.2
• qemu: 7.0.0 (Debian 1:7.0+dfsg-7ubuntu1~jammy1.0)
• host: Linux, kitty, fish