[PATCH] Add a check attribute on the mac address element

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 02:08:59PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 7/13/20 1:50 PM, Bastien Orivel wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On 13/07/2020 13:41, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> > > On 7/13/20 11:44 AM, Bastien Orivel wrote:
> > > > This is only used in the ESX driver where, when set to "no", it will
> > > > ignore all the checks libvirt does about the origin of the MAC address
> > > > (whether or not it's in a VMWare OUI) and forward the original one to
> > > > the ESX server telling it not to check it either.
> > > > 
> > > > This allows keeping a deterministic MAC address which can be useful for
> > > > licensed software which might dislike changes.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > While you get bonus points for remembering to document this change, it
> > > should go into a separate patch, because keeping it in a single one
> > > usually leads to conflicts on backports.
> > Oops, didn't know about that, will split in a v2 once we resolved the
> > other question.
> > 
> > > But anyway, looking at virVMXFormatEthernet() - why don't we set all
> > > MACs 'static'? Alternatively, we can use @mac_generated member to
> > > determine whether the MAC address was provided by user or
> > > automagically generated (and use static/generated addressType
> > > accrodingly)?
> > 
> > Mostly because I didn't want to break any existing script/setup that
> > relies on the fact that libvirt would set the address type to what it is
> > right now. For example, right now, providing a MAC address in the
> > @00:0c:29@ range makes the ESXi server generate a new MAC address on
> > define.
> 
> > I can imagine that some people outside always provide the same
> > MAC address to define their machine and rely on libvirt/ESXi to generate
> > a new one in that range for them.
> 
> This doesn't sound right. If they provide a MAC address we should guarantee
> it, if they don't provide address we should generate one, that suits
> hypervisor's needs.
> 
> Pino, you have more experience with ESX than I do, do you know whether we
> could do the switch to mark MAC addresses static/generated according to
> @mac_generated?

That's an internal thing though - if we want to support that properly for
ESX, then I think we need to make that an explicit type="static|generated"
attribute. In ESX there are different ranges you need to use for static vs
generated tooo.


Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|