[libvirt] RFC: API to report guest IP address(es)

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu Feb 9 09:36:57 UTC 2012


On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 12:30:16PM +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Now we have qemu guest agent it is possible for us to:
> 
> 1) extend guest agent to report IP addresses (not trivial among OSes).
> 
> 2) Write API which will report these to mgmt application.
> 
> One thing that I am not sure about and would like you to ask is:
> how should the API look like?
> In addition, we have this nwfilter which already learns host interfaces
> address (yeah, only one per interface).
> 
> What scenarios are we facing here?
> 1) It is impossible (in general) to tie guest interface with the host
> interface because guest can change  MAC address of any interface and
> this change is not propagated to the outside world. Therefore vnet1 can
> be eth0 or eth1 or even hello_i_am_funky_interface99.
> 
> 2) Guest can create virtual interfaces within itself and therefore
> create a totally different structure than observed from outside, e.g.
> bonding.

IMHO for libvirt we should just keep things simple. As you say, guest
network configuration can be very complicated, and this kind of info
is the sort of thing other guest agents like Matahari are going to
solve already.

At most libvirt should just return a flat list of addresses+prefixes
for the guest.

> 3) Interface can have multiple addresses or even none.
> 
> Therefore I lean to something like:
> 
> int virDomainGetIPAddresses(virDomainPtr dom, char **addr[], int
> *addr_size);
> 
> That is - simply return an array of IPs in string format (yes, allocated
> by us) and leave mgmt application to decide what to do with that.

You'll want a struct probably, so you can return address type + address
string + prefix length.

Flags to specify whether the adddress info source (ie a learnt address
from nwfilter, or a addr from guest agent)

Daniel
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