[libvirt] [PATCH 3/3] virsh: prevent removing a in-used bridge for iface-unbridge

[Laine Stump]

On 02/04/2015 10:57 AM, Jim Fehlig wrote:
> Laine Stump wrote:
>> (BTW, I'm still curious about Suse's use of netcf, as there have been no
>> updates to the Suse driver in netcf since the initial port was imported
>> several years ago. Are there downstream changes that can be sent upstream?)
>>   
> SUSE doesn't use netcf.  We were unable to find a volunteer from the
> networking team to maintain the initial port.  Instead they provided a
> netcf interface on top of their technologies, which at least allows us
> to use the libvirt netcf backend.

Ah yes, I vaguely remember this. They basically made a copy of the APIs
in netcf.h, then provided their own library under it. This worries me,
because it means that the two are in danger of getting out of sync in
some subtle (or not so subtle) way. For example, netcf recently added
support for reporting the link state (operstate from sysfs) and speed in
its status output. If this other library for SUSE had been implemented
as a backend in netcf, Suse would have gotten that addition more or less
for free (since it is linux-specific, but not distro-specific), but
instead people will complain that this feature (already used/expected in
the output of libvirt virsh iface-dumpxml) doesn't work on SUSE until
someone adds it to the SUSE work-alike library. (Even worse would be if
something was implemented in both libraries, but behaved slightly
differently in one).

You know, there is no hard requirement that the current "SUSE" backend
in netcf be the one that stays there - that backend was written by a
person for (I think) some embedded system that was using a SUSE-based
self-built distro, and they have long since abandoned it. If you have
any interest in putting in a backend based on the code your network
people have already written for their own library (either replacing the
current SUSE backend, or in addition to it), I'd be happy to help with
it. It may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth, but it's at
least worth considering.

Can you point me at the package that is implementing the netcf API, so I
can poke around a bit?