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

Laine Stump laine at laine.org
Thu Feb 9 12:26:47 UTC 2012


On 02/09/2012 04:36 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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)

Even though it's possible for the guest to change the MAC address, still 
it would be useful to provide that as well - the information is easily 
available, and in the best case can be useful.




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