Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER Hypervisor.
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Laine Stump ac2797cf2a util: fix functions that retrieve SRIOV VF info
This patch resolves:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889319

When assigning an SRIOV virtual function to a guest using "intelligent
PCI passthrough" (<interface type='hostdev'>, which sets the MAC
address and vlan tag of the VF before passing its info to qemu),
libvirt first learns the current MAC address and vlan tag by sending
an NLM_F_REQUEST message for the VF's PF (physical function) to the
kernel via a NETLINK_ROUTE socket (see virNetDevLinkDump()); the
response message's IFLA_VFINFO_LIST section is examined to extract the
info for the particular VF being assigned.

This worked fine with kernels up until kernel commit
115c9b81928360d769a76c632bae62d15206a94a (first appearing in upstream
kernel 3.3) which changed the ABI to not return IFLA_VFINFO_LIST in
the response until a newly introduced IFLA_EXT_MASK field was included
in the request, with the (newly introduced, of course) RTEXT_FILTER_VF
flag set.

The justification for this ABI change was that new fields had been
added to the VFINFO, causing NLM_F_REQUEST messages to fail on systems
with large numbers of VFs if the requesting application didn't have a
large enough buffer for all the info. The idea is that most
applications doing an NLM_F_REQUEST don't care about VFINFO anyway, so
eliminating it from the response would lower the requirements on
buffer size. Apparently, the people who pushed this patch made the
mistaken assumption that iproute2 (the "ip" command) was the only
package that used IFLA_VFINFO_LIST, so it wouldn't break anything else
(and they made sure that iproute2 was fixed.

The logic of this "fix" is debatable at best (one could claim that the
proper fix would be for the applications in question to be fixed so
that they properly sized the buffer, which is what libvirt does
(purely by virtue of using libnl), but it is what it is and we have to
deal with it.

In order for <interface type='hostdev'> to work properly on systems
with a kernel 3.3 or later, libvirt needs to add the afore-mentioned
IFLA_EXT_MASK field with RTEXT_FILTER_VF set.

Of course we also need to continue working on systems with older
kernels, so that one bit of code is compiled conditionally. The one
time this could cause problems is if the libvirt binary was built on a
system without IFLA_EXT_MASK which was subsequently updated to a
kernel that *did* have it. That could be solved by manually providing
the values of IFLA_EXT_MASK and RTEXT_FILTER_VF and adding it to the
message anyway, but I'm uncertain what that might actually do on a
system that didn't support the message, so for the time being we'll
just fail in that case (which will very likely never happen anyway).
2012-12-20 16:16:59 -05:00
.gnulib@d245e6ddd6 maint: update to latest gnulib 2012-10-22 20:25:44 -06:00
build-aux Document bracket whitespace rules & add syntax-check rule 2012-11-02 14:00:32 +00:00
daemon daemon: Preface polkit error output with 'polkit:' 2012-12-17 13:37:53 -05:00
docs docs: Fix documentation for readonly element 2012-12-18 14:09:01 +01:00
examples examples: Fix balloon event callback 2012-12-11 13:25:50 +01:00
gnulib build: fix fresh checkout on RHEL5 2012-04-19 17:11:43 -06:00
include Add support for offline migration 2012-12-10 21:52:15 +01:00
m4 build: make broken -Wlogical-op test be gcc-only 2012-12-19 12:21:09 -07:00
po Add support for USB host device passthrough with LXC 2012-12-17 17:50:51 +00:00
python Fix the indention 2012-12-04 23:41:35 +08:00
src util: fix functions that retrieve SRIOV VF info 2012-12-20 16:16:59 -05:00
tests Fix SELinux security label test 2012-12-19 10:05:17 +00:00
tools virsh: use vshReconnect for non-default connections too 2012-12-13 16:39:38 +01:00
.dir-locals.el build: avoid tabs that failed syntax-check 2012-09-06 09:43:46 -06:00
.gitignore .gitignore: add tests/sysinfotest 2012-12-17 14:40:48 -05:00
.gitmodules make .gnulib a submodule 2009-07-08 16:17:51 +02:00
.mailmap Autogenerate AUTHORS 2012-10-19 12:44:56 -04:00
AUTHORS.in Added Ján Tomko to the commiters list 2012-12-18 11:08:01 +08:00
autobuild.sh Switch automated builds to use Mingw64 toolchain instead of Mingw32 2012-06-25 10:41:10 +01:00
autogen.sh build: fix incremental autogen.sh when no AUTHORS is present 2012-12-03 14:59:09 -07:00
bootstrap maint: regenerate bootstrap 2012-07-27 09:34:04 -06:00
bootstrap.conf Add ability to maintain disk leases indirectly 2012-12-13 15:26:57 +00:00
cfg.mk tests: Add tests for sysinfo 2012-12-17 17:37:17 +00:00
ChangeLog-old virterror.c: Fix several spelling mistakes 2012-02-03 11:32:51 -07:00
configure.ac build: make broken -Wlogical-op test be gcc-only 2012-12-19 12:21:09 -07:00
COPYING.LIB remove all trailing blank lines 2009-07-16 15:06:42 +02:00
HACKING Document bracket whitespace rules & add syntax-check rule 2012-11-02 14:00:32 +00:00
libvirt.pc.in build: silence warning from autoconf 2012-05-30 09:22:02 -06:00
libvirt.spec.in spec: Do not install *.py[co] in python examples 2012-12-18 18:03:31 +01:00
Makefile.am build: Fix AUTHORS generation 2012-12-17 21:17:55 +01:00
Makefile.nonreentrant Ban use of all inet_* functions 2010-10-22 11:59:23 +01:00
mingw-libvirt.spec.in parallels: add driver skeleton 2012-08-01 11:44:26 +08:00
README Correct typos in the documentation (Atsushi SAKAI) 2008-01-24 10:15:13 +00:00
README-hacking maint: relax git minimum version 2010-02-24 14:29:27 -05:00
run.in Add a virtlockd client as a lock driver impl 2012-12-13 15:26:57 +00:00
TODO Update todo list file to point at bugzilla/website 2010-10-13 16:45:26 +01:00

         LibVirt : simple API for virtualization

  Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities
of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). It is free software
available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Virtualization of
the Linux Operating System means the ability to run multiple instances of
Operating Systems concurrently on a single hardware system where the basic
resources are driven by a Linux instance. The library aim at providing
long term stable C API initially for the Xen paravirtualization but
should be able to integrate other virtualization mechanisms if needed.

Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>