[libvirt] RFC: configuring host interfaces with libvirt

[David Lutterkort]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 13:49 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 09:00:16AM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > 
> > The thing is, this has to integrate with existing configuration -
> > there's no point in futzing about with "ip link set eth0 ..." if the
> > user has configured eth0 with NetworkManager or the distro's networking
> > scripts.
> 
> Yes, I think option 2 is pretty much doomed to fail. If you don't
> integrate with the native distro mgmt scripts, or with NetworkManager
> then you are forever going to have a fight between who's managing
> what. You can already see this with Xen's network-bridge script
> which cna be considered option 2. If you restart your network using
> the distro scripts, after Xen's network-bridge script has run, then
> you end up wwith a completely trashed host network.

That goes for pretty much any config munging task - don't ever change
the canonical place where config data is stored; for network devices
that's dictated by the distro. Whatever we do for libvirt can only ever
be an (updatable) view of that data.

David