[Libvir] [RFC] Life-cycle Management of the domain take2

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Fri May 11 18:15:33 UTC 2007


On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 02:07:50PM -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 10:59:37PM +0900, Saori Fukuta wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Thank you for your comment !
> > 
> > On Fri, 11 May 2007 13:33:57 +0100 "Richard W.M. Jones" wrote:
> > > It sounds to me like the real solution would be to either fix 
> > > virDomainGetXMLDesc to return these missing fields, or add another call 
> > > to get them, or (for the password) to store it elsewhere.
> > > 
> > > How about loading the original config XML and the XML from the running 
> > > domain (virDomainGetXMLDesc), and then updating the config XML with only 
> > > certain fields from the running domain?
> > 
> > Well, I'm not sure about the meaning of "original config XML" but I do
> > not think it is possible because the original config file might be not XML
> > like a Xen config file. Xen does not have XML file.
> > Is this right ?
> 
>   Yes I'm not sure that in general you can always hope to reconstruct the
> content of the configuration file just from a pointer to a running 
> instance,

If the guest was created by libvirt, then I consider it a bug if the XML
dump does not allow re-creation in exact same config. 

If the guest was created by non-libvirt app, then there may be some xen 
specific bits we don't support in libvirt. So be it - there are some things
we simply don't want to support. For any of the latter  case, we can at 
least evaluate whether it makes sense to support them throughout libvirt,
and/or accept patches.

The main flaw I see currently is that the vncpassword is missing from the
XML. We left that out for security obviously. We definitely have to exclude
it if using a read-only connection. For a read-write connection we should
probably continue to exclude it by default, since apps often write the XML
dump to logfiles. We do fortunately have a (currently unused) flags argument
to virDomainGetXMLDesc

  char *                  virDomainGetXMLDesc     (virDomainPtr domain,
                                                   int flags);

I propose we add a flag LIBVIRT_XML_INCLUDE_SENSITIVE  or something like
that. If that flag were used, then we could include the password in the
returned XML. Any apps using that flag would be aware that the XML should
be treated as sensitive & thus not logged.

The localtime option is something we should consider adding becasue
that is relevant for any fullyvirt system, to specify whether the emulated
BIOS should be set in localtime or UTC. QEMU/KVM also support a localtime
option & folks running Windows guests frequently need it.

Dan.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=| 




More information about the libvir-list mailing list