[libvirt] [PATCH 0/7] Introduce API for dumping domain IP addresses

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2012 at 04:39:06PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 08.06.2012 15:26, Dave Allan wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 08, 2012 at 10:04:31AM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> >> This feature has been requested for a very long time. However,
> >> we had to wait for guest agent to obtain reliable results as
> >> user might create totally different structure of interfaces than
> >> seen from outside (e.g. bonding, virtual interfaces, etc.).
> >> That's the main reason why sniffing for domain traffic can
> >> return bogus results. Fortunately, qemu guest agent implement
> >> requested part for a while so nothing holds us back anymore.
> >>
> >> To make matters worse, guest OS can assign whatever name to
> >> an interface and changing MAC inside guest isn't propagated
> >> to the host which in the end see original one.
> >>
> >> Therefore, finding correlation between interface within guest
> >> and the host side end is left as exercise for mgmt applications.
> >>
> >> This API is called virDomainInterfacesAddresses (okay, maybe
> >> too many plurals) and returns a dynamically allocated array
> >> of virDomainInterface struct. The great disadvantage once
> >> this gets released, it's written in stone and we cannot change
> >> or add an item into it. Therefore we might add a padding into
> >> it - something like reserved for future use. On the other hand,
> >> everything important is already there - what else we will want
> >> to add? :)
> > 
> > How about returning an XML document instead of a struct?  We've been
> > burned by structs in the past...
> 
> If we decide to go this way, then we should return JSON which is easier
> to parse within C code. However, the most easy to use is current
> proposal IMO.

I agree with Eric that we shouldn't introduce a new text based data
format, since we already use XML everywhere. If someone really likes
XML, it ought to be possible to write a general purpose API which
transforms any XML document into a JSON document & vica-verca.

Daniel
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