The <teaming> element in <interface> allows pairing two interfaces together as a simple "failover bond" network device in a guest. One of the devices is the "transient" interface - it will be preferred for all network traffic when it is present, but may be removed when necessary, in particular during migration, when traffic will instead go through the other interface of the pair - the "persistent" interface. As it happens, in the QEMU implementation of this teaming pair (called "virtio failover" in QEMU) the transient interface is always a host network device assigned to the guest using VFIO (aka "hostdev"); the persistent interface is always an emulated virtio NIC. When support was initially added for <teaming>, it was written to require that the transient/hostdev device be defined using <interface type='hostdev'>; this was done because the virtio failover implementation in QEMU and the virtio guest driver demands that the two interfaces in the pair have matching MAC addresses, and the only way libvirt can guarantee the MAC address of a hostdev network device is to use <interface type='hostdev'>, whose main purpose is to configure the device's MAC address before handing the device to QEMU. (note that <interface type='hostdev'> in turn requires that the network device be an SRIOV VF (Virtual Function), as that is the only type of network device whose MAC address we can set in a way that will survive the device's driver init in the guest). It has recently come up that some users are unable to use <teaming> because they are running in a container environment where libvirt doesn't have the necessary privileges or resources to set the VF's MAC address (because setting the VF MAC is done via the same device's PF (Physical Function), and the PF is not exposed to libvirt's container). At the same time, these users *are* able to set the VF's MAC address themselves in advance of staring up libvirt in the container. So they could theoretically use the <teaming> feature if libvirt just skipped the "setting the MAC address" part. Fortunately, that is *exactly* the difference between <interface type='hostdev'> (which must be a "hostdev VF") and <hostdev> (a "plain hostdev" - it could be *any* PCI device; libvirt doesn't know what type of PCI device it is, and doesn't care). But what is still needed is for libvirt to provide a small bit of information on the QEMU commandline argument for the hostdev, telling QEMU that this device will be part of a team ("failover pair"), and the id of the other device in the pair. To make both of those goals simultaneously possible, this patch adds support for the <teaming> element to plain <hostdev> - libvirt doesn't try to set any MAC addresses, and QEMU gets the extra commandline argument it needs) (actually, this patch adds only the parsing/formatting of the <teaming> element in <hostdev>. The next patch will actually wire that into the qemu driver.) Signed-off-by: Laine Stump <laine@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Privoznik <mprivozn@redhat.com>
Libvirt API for virtualization
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.
For some of these hypervisors, it provides a stateful management daemon which runs on the virtualization host allowing access to the API both by non-privileged local users and remote users.
Layered packages provide bindings of the libvirt C API into other languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, OCaml, as well as mappings into object systems such as GObject, CIM and SNMP.
Further information about the libvirt project can be found on the website:
License
The libvirt C API is distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 (or later). Some parts of the code that are not part of the C library may have the more restrictive GNU General Public License, version 2.0 (or later). See the files COPYING.LESSER
and COPYING
for full license terms & conditions.
Installation
Instructions on building and installing libvirt can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/compiling.html
Contributing
The libvirt project welcomes contributions in many ways. For most components the best way to contribute is to send patches to the primary development mailing list. Further guidance on this can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/contribute.html
Contact
The libvirt project has two primary mailing lists:
- libvirt-users@redhat.com (for user discussions)
- libvir-list@redhat.com (for development only)
Further details on contacting the project are available on the website: