[libvirt PATCH 12/12] conf/qemu: new <driver> attribute "useBackupMAC"

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:24:19PM -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
> Current virtio-net drivers that support the failover feature match up
> the virtio backup device with its corresponding hostdev device by
> looking for an interface with a matching MAC address. Since libvirt
> will assign a different random MAC address to each interface that
> isn't given an explicit MAC address, this means that the configuration
> for any failover pairs must include explicit matching MAC addresses.
> 
> To make life easier, we could have libvirt populate the XML config
> with the same auto-generated MAC address for both interfaces when it
> detects a failover pair that have no MAC addresses provided (a
> failover pair can be detected by matching <alias name='blah'/> of the
> virtio interface with <driver backupAlias='blah'/> of the hostdev
> interface), but then we would be stuck with that behavior even if the
> virtio guest driver later eliminated the requirement that mac
> addresses match.
> 
> Additionally, some management software uses the MAC address as the
> primary index for its list of network devices, and can't properly deal
> with two interfaces having the same MAC address (oVirt). Even
> libvirt's own virsh utility uses MAC address (combined with interface
> type) to uniquely identify interfaces for the virsh detach-interface
> command (in this case, fortunately the runtime interface type is used,
> so one of the interfaces will always be of type='hostdev' and the
> other type='something-else", so it doesn't currently cause any problem).
> 
> In order to remove the necessity of explicitly setting interface MAC
> addresses, as well as permit the two interfaces of a failover pair to
> each have a unique index while still fulfilling the current guest
> driver requirement that the MAC addresses matchin the guest, this
> patch adds a new attribute "useBackupMAC" that is set on the hostdev
> interface of the pair. When useBackupMAC='yes', the setup for the
> hostdev interface will find the virtio failover interface (using
> backupAlias) and use that interface's MAC address to initialize the
> MAC address of the hostdev interface; the MAC address in the hostdev
> interface config remains unchanged, it just isnt used for device
> initialization.
> 
> I made this patch to followup on
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1693587#c12 (where I
> suggested this attribute as a possible remedy to oVirt's requirement
> that each network device have a unique MAC address).
> 
> Truthfully, I'm not convinced that I want it though, as it seems
> "a bit" hackish. In particular, I've thought for a long time that the
> "hostdev manager" code in util/virhostdev.c should really live in the
> node device driver and be called from the hypervisors via a public API
> (so that there is one central place on the host that maintains the
> list of in-use PCI devices and their status), but this patch adds an
> obstacle to that goal by adding a virDomainDefPtr to more of the APIs in
> that library - if this was turned into a public API, then entire
> virDomainDef would need to be serialized and sent in the API call,
> then parsed at the other end - yuck :-/.  NB: there are already
> functions in virhostdev.h that take a virDomainDefPtr, so maybe I'm
> being too sensitive.
> 
> On the upside, it solves a problem, and default bevahior is unchanged.

I don't believe it does solve a real problem.

If a mgmt app is capable of setting useBackupMAC=yes when writing the 
XML doc, then I don't see why it cannot just as easily set the matching 
MAC address when wring the XML doc.

It can still treat both NICs as having a different MAC address in its 
own internal code. All it has to do is use the matching MAC address 
when writing out the XML config it gives to libvirt.

I know oVirt has a facility for hook scripts that are add-ons which
can arbitrarily munge the XML that VDSM creates. So AFAICT this doesn't
even need to involve changes to VDSM itself. There can be a hook
script which looks for the config indicating a failover pair, and
rewrites the XML to have the matching MAC addr.

Such a workaround then only needs to exist for as long as the mgmt
app has this problematic limitation without impacting libvirt's
maint.

So I don't want to take this application specific hack in libvirt.

Regards,
Daniel
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