For certain applications, we want libvirt to be able to configure host
network interfaces in a variety of ways; currently, we are most
interested in teaching libvirt how to set up ordinary ethernet
interfaces, bridges, bonding and vlan's.
Below is a high-level proposal of how that could be done. Please comment
copiously ;)
1. XML Format
=============
The first question is how the user would describe the host interfaces they
want. Below are some sketches of what an XML representation of the various
kinds of interfaces would look like. This covers the minimal amount of
settings for these to be useful, though I am sure we'll need to add more
over time.
<interface device="eth0" onboot="yes">
<hwaddr>00:19:d2:9f:88:96</hwaddr>
<dhcp peerdns="yes"/>
</interface>
<interface device="eth1" onboot="yes">
<hwaddr>00:19:d2:9f:88:97</hwaddr>
<static ipaddr="192.168.0.5" gateway="192.168.0.1" netmask="255.255.255.0"/>
</interface>
<interface device="eth2" onboot="yes">
<hwaddr>00:19:d2:9f:88:98</hwaddr>
</interface>
<bond name="bond00" onboot="yes" mode="active-backup">
<slave device="eth0" primary="yes"/>
<slave device="eth1"/>
</bond>
<bridge name="br0" stp="off" onboot="yes">
<member device="eth2"/>
<dhcp peerdns="yes"/>
</bridge>
<vlan device="eth0" tag="42" reorder_hdr="yes"/>
All of these should also allow a <uuid> element for specifying a uuid; I
omitted that for brevity.
2. API Changes
==============
There are two options for dealing with network interfaces: (1) use the
existing virNetwork* calls or (2) add completely new API calls.
Repurposing existing virNetwork* calls
--------------------------------------
The existing calls map well to the operations we need for managing
interfaces, with a few exceptions:
- virNetworkGetAutostart/SetAutostart: depending on how we implement all
this (see below), 'autostart' might actually mean 'on boot', not 'when
libvirtd starts'
- virNetworkGetBridgeName doesn't make sense for interfaces, and should
return NULL for interfaces
We'll probably also end up adding some functions to query details about an
interface, in particular, a call to see what kind of network/interface a
virNetworkPtr represents
Add completely new virInterface* calls
--------------------------------------
This would add roughly the same API calls as the virNetwork* calls,
i.e. we'd have something like
typedef struct virInterface *virInterfacePtr;
int virInterfaceCreate(virInterfacePtr);
virInterfacePtr virInterfaceCreateXML(..);
...
plus some calls to extract information from a virInterfacePtr
The second option seems cleaner to me and easier to implement, and avoids
any subtle changes in the behavior of existing API, though I don't like
that we'll be adding another 20 or so calls to libvirt's public API, with
attendant churn both in the drivers and in virsh.
3. Implementation
=================
Configuring network interfaces is highly OS and OS-variant/distro
dependant. There are at least two different ways how libvirt can go about
modifying the host to create interfaces:
1. Modify the system's network setup scripts (ifcfg-XXX on RH)
2. Directly use the system's network utilities like ifconfig
3. Rely on NetworkManager (not an option right now, as NM doesn't know
about bridges and the like)
Option (1) saves us from replicating every bit of network setup
functionality that those scripts already have - besides configuring the
interface, we also might have to setup routes, run dhclient etc.
Option (2) would require far fewer backend implementations than (1) - we
should be able to get away with one implementation for Linux, rather than
one for Fedora/RHEL, one for Debian, one for SuSe, three for gentoo
etc.
If we want 'autostart' for an interface to mean 'bring up the interface
as soon as the system boots', we are pretty much forced to go with
option (1).
All in all, option (1) seems more attractive, since it should save us from
dealing with a lot of low-level details of network setup, and the distro
scripts should be much better integrated with the rest of the system than
what we come up with for libvirt.
4. Misc issues
==============
* Should interfaces have labels/roles ('data-interface') to help admins
make sense of the current config ?
* Do we expect interfaces to be in a specific state before we create them
or do we just tear them down and reconfigure them no matter what ?
* Are there crucial config options that are not covered by the sketches
above (e.g., setting an explicit MTU) ? Are there things in the XML
sketches above that will be impossible to implement on some OS ?
* Should this even be done as part of libvirt ? It seems like a very
generic network config tool, and libvirt merely the conduit to exposing
this through an API, most importantly, a remotable API.
David
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