[libvirt PATCH 0/3] network: support NAT with IPv6

Laine Stump laine at redhat.com
Tue Jun 9 20:24:22 UTC 2020


On 6/9/20 12:27 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 11:05:00PM -0400, Laine Stump wrote:
>> On 6/8/20 10:51 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>>> The virtual network has never supported NAT with IPv6 since this feature
>>> didn't exist at the time. NAT has been available since RHEL-7 vintage
>>> though, and it is desirable to be able to use it.
>>>
>>> This series enables it with
>>>
>>>     <forward mode=3D"nat">
>>>       <nat ipv6=3D"yes"/>
>>>     </forward>
>> I've had this lurking on my "this is something I should do" list for a long
>> time, but couldn't decide on the best name in XML (and also figured that the
>> problem with accept_ra needed to be fixed first), so it never got to the
>> top. So I'm glad to see you've done it, disappointed in myself that I never
>> did it :-/
>>
>> I like your XML knob naming better than what I'd considered. I had thought
>> of having <forward mode='supernat'> (or some other more reasonable extra
>> mode), but your proposal is more orthogonal and matches with the existing
>> ipv6='yes' at the toplevel of <network> (which is used to enable ipv6
>> traffic between guests on the bridge even when there are no IPv6 addresses
>> configured for the network.)
> I considered  mode="nat6" as an alternative, but it would have meant
> updating many switch() statements, and is a somewhat misleading as a
> name.


Yeah, the way you have it is much better.


>
>>>     </network>
>>>
>>> Conceptually this means
>>>
>>>    - Try to gimme a subnet with IPv4 and DHCP
>>>    - Try to gimme a subnet with IPv6 and RAs
>>>
>>> Now when we start the virtual network
>>>
>>>    - If IPv4 is not enabled on host, don't assign addr
>> What will we use to check for this? Not just "no IP addresses configured", I
>> guess, since it may be the case that libvirt has just happened to come up
>> before NM or whoever has started any networks. (or maybe someone wants to
>> use IPv6 on a libvirt virtual network, but have no IPv6 connectivity beyond
>> the host).
> IIUC, we can simply check whether it is possible to create a socket
> with AF_INET or AF_INET6.  If the kernel supports it, then this
> should suceed, even if network manager isn't running yet.
>
>>>    - Else
>>>      - Iterate N=3D1..254 to find a free range for IPv4
>>>      - Use 192.168.N.0/24 for subnet
>>>      - Use 192.168.N.1 for host IP
>>>      - Use 192.168.N.2 -> 192.168.N.254 for guest DHCP
>>>
>>>    - If IPv6 is not enabled on host, don't assign addr
>>>    - Else
>>>      - Generate NNNN:NNNN as 4 random bytes
>>>      - Use fd00:add:f00d:NNNN:NNNN::0/64 for IPv6 subnet
>>>      - Use fd00:add:f00d:NNNN:NNNN::1 for host IP
>>>      - Use route advertizement for IPv6 zero-conf
>>>
>>> With NNNN:NNNN, even with 1000 guests running, we have just a 0.02%
>>> chance of clashing with a guest for IPv6.
>>>
>>> The "live" XML would always reflect the currently assigned addresses
>>>
>>> Proactively monitor the address allocations of the host. If we see
>>> a conflicting address appear, take down the dnsmasq intance, generate
>>> a new subnet, bring dnsmasq back online.
>> Hmm. How would you see this monitoring happening? We couldn't do it with an
>> external script like I had done for simple "shut down on conflict" without
>> adding extra functionality to libvirt's network driver. We *could* go back
>> to the idea of monitoring netlink change messages ourselves within libvirtd
>> and doing it all internally ourselves. Or maybe the NM script I proposed
>> could go beyond simply destroying conflicting networks, and also restart any
>> network that had autoaddr='yes'; to make this fully functional we would need
>> to finally put in the proper stuff so that tap devices (and the underlying
>> emulated NICs) would be set offline when their connected network was
>> destroyed, and then reconnected/set online when the network was re-started.
>> Getting the networks to behave this way would be useful in general anyway,
>> even without thinking about the conflicting-networks problem. The one
>> downside of externally controlling renumbering-on-conflict using an external
>> script is that it would only work with NetworkManager...
> Yeah, I'm trying to remember now why we went the NM hook route, rather
> than listening for netlink events. I guess NM is much simpler to hook
> into.


You mentioned the NM hook idea (I hadn't even known they had such hooks) 
when we were talking about libvirtd using activation sockets (unrelated 
to network conflict stuff), and I said that needing to have a thread 
always listening for netlink change messages was in conflict with the 
idea of having libvirtd use activation sockets and exit after a timeout. 
Once we decide that we're responsible for watching all netlink change 
messages, we have to have a process that's always running (also we would 
have to read the entire state of all interfaces each time that process 
was started, and respond to any changes that had taken place since the 
last time the process exited).


(Probably a NM hook script is also much easier than monitoring netlink 
message, since there's no need to figure out which field in which type 
of messages to look at, and you don't have to setup the thread to listen 
for it, etc. Just a simple python program that gets called with all 
relevant info in text format either in argv, or in the environment.)


>    I'd honestly not thought about this too much though - just having
> an automatically numbered network will already be a huge step forward
> compared to current day.


True. First step is having it auto-numbered at startup. 2nd step is 
making it auto-renumber when required while running. Either step 1.5 or 
step 3 would be saving the auto-number decision to use as first try the 
next time it's started.


>
> In particular if we insituted a rule that if we are NOT on a hypervisor,
> we count from N=254 -> 0, when picking 192.168.N.0, and count from
> N=0 -> 254 when we are on a hypervisor, then we'll trivially avoid the
> host/guest clash in simple case, even if network is not yet online.
>
> Don't anyone dare mention nested virt with 3 levels of libvirt...
>
> Seriously though, even without automatic teardown & restart, we'd
> be way better off by simply not hardcoding 192.168.N.0 at RPM
> install time when the network env is not the same as the run time
> network env. eg cloud images


Yep. Especially when you consider that (e.g.) even installing Fedora to 
disk from a live image doesn't involve running any of the rpm 
postinstall scripts - it just copies the complete image over to the 
destination from the live image; so the environment encountered when the 
final OS boots is two "environment steps" removed from the environment 
that was in effect at the time the rpm postinstall ran.


>
>>> Ideally we would have to bring the guest network links offline and
>>> then online again to force DHCP re-assignment immediately.
>> Yeah, I think it really makes sense that when a libvirt network is
>> destroyed, all the tap devices are set offline, and the emulated NICs are
>> set offline as well; then when a libvirt network is started, we would go
>> through all devices that are supposed to be connected to that network,
>> reconnect the taps, set them online, and set the emulated NIC online. We
>> currently do the reconnection part when libvirtd is restarted but can't do
>> it immediately when a *network* is restarted because the network driver has
>> no access to the list of active guests and their interfaces....
>>
>> Hmm, we do now maintain the list of ports for each network though, and it
>> would be possible to expand that to keep the name of the tap device
>> associated with the port in addition to the other info (e.g. whether or not
>> the NIC has been set offline via an API call), *but* when a network is
>> destroyed, all ports registered with that network are also destroyed, so
>> just expanding the attributes for the ports isn't going to get us where we
>> need. So, do we want to 1) change it to maintain active ports for a network
>> when it is destroyed so that they can be easily reactivated when the network
>> is restarted? Or do we want to 2) change the network driver to make calls to
>> all registered hypervisor drivers during a net-start to look for all guest
>> interfaces that think they are connected to the network? The former sounds
>> much more efficient, but I don't know how "dirty" it seems to maintain state
>> for something that has been "destroyed"...
>>
>> Or maybe we instead need to also add a new API for networks
>> virNetworkReconnect(), which will use newly expanded info in the network
>> ports list to reconnect all guest interfaces.
> Responsibility for enslaving a TAP device into a bridge still lives with
> the virt drivers, not the network driver.
>
> The virt drivers could listen for lifecycle events from the network driver
> and auto-reconnect.


Yeah, that could work too. *something* so that an entity that has the 
proper info about tap devices finds out that the tap device needs to be 
re-attached. And since currently all the code from 
creating/destroying/attaching tap devices lives in the various 
hypervisors, I guess this makes the most sense.


>
> Alternatively the virt driver could listen for netlink events and see the
> virbr0 being deleted, and created by the kernel.


On one hand, it seems cleaner to do it by watching for lifecycle events 
from the network driver. On the other hand, that wouldn't properly 
handle cases where someone was "secretly" attaching to a libvirt-created 
bridge with <interface type='bridge'> (e.g. session-mode guests that are 
taking advantage of qemu-bridge-helper) or guests that attach to a 
non-libvirt-managed bridge that happens to disappear and reappear.


>
>> On a different sub-topic - it would be nice to provide some stability to the
>> subnet used for an autoaddr='yes' network (think of the case where every
>> time a host is booted, libvirt starts its default network when
>> 192.168.122.0/24 is available, but then a short time later a host interface
>> is always started on the same subnet - that would mean every time the host
>> booted the exact same destabilizing dance would take place even though it
>> would be pretty easy to predict the eventually-used subnet based on past
>> experience).
>>
>> Although we historically have avoided automatic changes to libvirt config
>> files by libvirtd itself as much as possible (the only cases I can think of
>> are when we're modifying the config to take care of some compatibility
>> problem after an upgrade), what do you think about having the autoaddr='yes'
>> networks automatically update the config with the current subnet info?
>> (maybe this would need to only be done if not starting from a live image or
>> something, or maybe it should just always be done). This would then be used
>> as the first guess the next time the network was started. That way we would
>> avoid the need to delay starting libvirt networks until after host
>> networking was fully up; the subnet might bounce around a bit that first
>> time, but once a stable address was found during that first run, it would
>> then be used from the get-go during all subsequent boots (until/unless
>> something changed and it had to be changed yet again).
> We could stash the previously chosen  subnet in /var/cache/libvirt/network
> or /var/lib/libvirt/network, no need to modify the inactive XML config.
> This is like how dnsmasq "remembers" DHCP leases previously given for guests.


Yeah, even better.


I think /var/cache/libvirt/network sounds more appropriate. What format 
do you think it should be stored in? We have have some stuff like that 
stored as XML (in particular, qemu capabilities cache is in /var/cache 
and stored as XML), and at least one thing stored in /var/run/libvirt as 
JSON (saved MAC address/vlan tag of VFs saved when a VF is assigned to a 
guest, so that it can be restored later). It was actually *me* who added 
that latter - the file originally just held the plain raw MAC address 
(in ASCII), but we needed to expand it; I was originally going to put it 
there in XML, but there was *something* else going on at the time that 
convinced me to put it in JSON instead (some other new file was being 
stored in JSON, or ??? I seriously don't remember the details, just that 
there was something that influenced that decision).

(BTW, I notice that the specfile creates /var/lib/libvirt/network during 
install/upgrade, but it's empty, and I don't see any place in the code 
that references it (we do put stuff in /var/run/libvirt/network, but 
that's a different beast). Is that just an artifact of when we were 
incorrectly putting network status in /var/lib/libvirt instead of 
/var/run/libvirt, and we forgot to remove the line in the specfile when 
that was fixed? Or did my cursory audit of the code miss something?)





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