We have several possible ways of communicating with other entities. We use
sockets to communicate with the host and other network sites, but also in
a different context to communicate "spliced" channels to a namespace. We
also use a tuntap device or a qemu socket to communicate with the namespace
or guest.
For the time being these are just defined implicitly by how we structure
things. However, there are other communication channels we want to use in
future (e.g. virtio-user), and we want to allow more flexible forwarding
between those. To accomplish that we're going to want a specific way of
referring to those channels.
Introduce the concept of a "passt/pasta interface" or "pif" representing a
specific channel to communicate network data. Each pif is assumed to be
associated with a specific network namespace in the broad sense (that is
as a place where IP addresses have a consistent meaning - not the Linux
specific sense). But there could be multiple pifs communicating with the
same namespace (e.g. the spliced and tap interfaces in pasta).
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>
