[libvirt] [PATCH] nwfilter: enable bridge netfilter calls via proc filesystem

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 08:45:41AM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
>  On 09/23/2010 07:33 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 11:36:11AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 02:19:31PM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
> >>>  On a recent installation of FC13, the filtering of IP/IPv6 using
> >>>iptables/ip6tables traffic did not work since the proc filesystem
> >>>entries /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-iptables and
> >>>/proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-ip6tables contained a zero each and
> >>>no traffic went into the FORWARD chain. The patch below makes sure that
> >>>if iptables or ip6tables are being used by the nwfilter driver that a
> >>>'1' is written into the relevant proc filesystem entry so that the
> >>>traffic goes into the FORWARD chain.
> >>What parts of the nwfilter functionality gets affected by this ?
> >>
> >>IIUC, the higher level protocols, TCP, UDP, SCTP, ICMP,
> >>IGMP, ESP, AH, UDPLITE&  'ALL'  get implemented via iptables ?
> >>Alot of the matches you can define using these higher level
> >>protocols, can also be defined using the generic IPv4/IPv6 rules.
> >>For example everything you can do with TCP protocol can be done
> >>with the IPv4/IPv6 protocol, with exception of ip address ranges.
> >>
> >>
> >>Could we either
> >>
> >>  1. Document that if you want to make use of the higher level
> >>     protocols, that you need to enable bridge-nf-call-iptables
> >>     and explain the tradeoffs in that setting.[1][2]
> >>
> >>  2. Provide an alternative impl of 90% of the higher level
> >>     protocols, using ebtables instead of iptables. And make
> >>     choice of iptables vs ebtables a config param for libvirtd.
> >>     eg, for most people an ebtables based impl will be sufficient
> >>     but if they need the full funtionality,then switch to the
> >>     iptables impl&  enable bridge-nf-call-iptables=1
> >Actally I guess 2. is rather pointless given that you can already just
> >use the IPv4/6 generic rules to do 90% of that stuff. I think this just
> >comes down to a documentation issue, explaining the pros&cons of each
> >possible bridge-nf-call-* setting.
> 
> Yes, it should work and would be a matter of writing the rules 
> differently so that they get enforced on ebtables layer rather than 
> iptables.
> 
> I still think that if the user writes filtering rules that end up 
> creating iptables rules that in that case the bridge-nf-call-* should 
> automatically be enabled by libvirt so that the filtering works as 
> expected -- assuming the user would end up doing the same anyway (after 
> looking for the reason why it does not work as expected).

The problem is that changing bridge-nf-call-* may make libvirt's
functionality behave 'as expected', but since this is a system
wide setting, it will change the behaviour of other non-libvirt
apps in ways that may not be expected.  For example, it may cause
packet loss with UDP, because it means that TUNSETSNDBUF will no
longer throttle guest UDP packets from QEMU.

In this case the admin may well prefer to rewrite their nwfilter rule
to use the 'ipv4' match, rather than have libvirt silently change the
bridge-nf-call-* settings.

Perhaps we should log a warning if a rule is activated for a guest, 
that we know will have no effect, due to bridge-nf-call-* settings.

Daniel
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