[et-mgmt-tools] Features request

[Emre Erenoglu]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Michal Novotny <minovotn at redhat.com> wrote:

>  Well, in my opinion you have to consider that virt-manager supports both
> KVM and Xen so you can't simply give KVM only stuff there. It's like the
> ac97 card request - Xen doesn't support this card so virt-manager doesn't
> have a choice to select it at all. In fact, there should be one way for
> already existing and maybe even domain creation - the information about
> connection type is stored when we have domain already setup but also, in
> creating new domain we know (due to virt-manager.log) what hv type will be
> used - whether kvm or xen so theoretically this should work to compensate
> the differences between KVM/Xen but I don't know whether it's a right way.
>

Then why don't we just make an "advanced" field where a user can enter his
own parameters to the qemu-kvm binary?

To your requested features:
> 1. Bridged networking - yeah, this could be good to be added there not to
> have to setup the bridge manually
>

+1 for this one, but with a normal user account in kvm group (not root).
Adding to this:

2. Snapshots - like I said, you're referring to KVM so see above, Xen can
> save the machine to a checkpoint file while not running (ie. this shuts the
> domain down) or even when running (not shutting the domain down) and I think
> nothing else is there about that. I don't know about KVM options.
> 3. Additional networking options - what options do you mean? What would you
> like to have there?
>

I would like to open an already created TAP interface. I have a script
running at boot time which creates the bridge and as many TAP interfaces as
you want, owned by group kvm. Any user who is a member of kvm group can use
these tap interfaces to have bridged networking in their virtual machines,
without needing privilate escalation or running as root. Therefore:

3.1. Ability to choose a pre-defined TAP interface. (ie, if the OS provides
pre-cooked tapX devices read/write by kvm group that one can assign to his
VMs). A config, such as:

Example Config Proposal:

      <interface type='bridge'>
        <source bridge='br0'/>
*        <target dev='your_precreated_tap_interface'/>
        <create dev='no'>
*        <mac address="11:22:33:44:55:66"/>
      </interface>

This is more or less the same thing as bridged networking of
libvirt/virt-manager, just skipping the tap device creation part and using
an existing tap instead.

4. Bridge wireless NIC cards - would this be useful?
>

It would be, but I think there are technical limitations for bridging a
wireless and a wireline card.

Best Regards,
-- 
Emre
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