[virt-tools-list] [ovirt-devel] [kubevirt-dev] Re: Project for profiles and defaults for libvirt domains

Wed Apr 4 16:23:01 UTC 2018

[resending to include KubeVirt devs ]

YANIV LAVI

SENIOR TECHNICAL PRODUCT MANAGER

Red Hat Israel Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com/>

34 Jerusalem Road, Building A, 1st floor

Ra'anana, Israel 4350109

ylavi at redhat.com    T: +972-9-7692306/8272306     F: +972-9-7692223    IM: ylavi
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On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 7:07 PM, Yaniv Lavi <ylavi at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> I'd like to go one step back and discuss why we should try to do this on
> the high level.
>
> For the last 5-10 years of KVM development, we are pragmatically providing
> the Linux host level APIs via project specific host agents/integration code
> (Nova agent, oVirt host agent, virt-manager).
> In recent time we see new projects that have similar requirements
> (Cockpit, different automation tool, KubeVirt), this means that all of the
> Linux virt stack consumers are reinventing the wheel and using very
> different paths to consume the partial solutions that are provided today.
>
> The use of the Linux virt stack is well defined by the existing projects
> scope and it makes a lot of sense to try to provide the common patterns via
> the virt stack directly as a host level API that different client or
> management consume.
> The main goal is to improve the developer experience for virtualization
> management applications with an API set that is useful to the entire set of
> tools (OSP, oVirt, KubeVirt, Cockpit and so on).
>
> The Linux virt developer community currently is not able to provide best
> practices and optimizations from single node knowledge. This means that all
> of that smarts is locked to the specific project integration in the good
> case or not provided at all and the projects as a whole lose from that.
> When testing the Linux virt stack itself and since each project has
> different usage pattern, we lose the ability to test abilities on the lower
> level making the entire stack less stable and complete for new features.
>
> This also limits the different projects ability to contribute back to the
> Linux stack based on their user and market experience for others in open
> source to gain.
>
> I understand this shift is technically challenging for existing projects,
> but I do see value in doing this even for new implementation like Cockpit
> and KubeVirt.
> I also believe that the end result could be appealing enough to cause
> project like OSP, virt-manager and oVirt to consider to reduce the existing
> capabilities of their host side integrations/agents to shims on the host
> level and reuse the common/better-tested pattern as clients that was
> developed against the experience of the different projects.
>
> I call us all to collaborate and try to converge on a solution that will
> help all in the long term in the value you get from the common base.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> YANIV LAVI
>
> SENIOR TECHNICAL PRODUCT MANAGER
>
> Red Hat Israel Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com/>
>
> 34 Jerusalem Road, Building A, 1st floor
>
> Ra'anana, Israel 4350109
>
> ylavi at redhat.com    T: +972-9-7692306/8272306     F: +972-9-7692223    IM: ylavi
>  <https://red.ht/sig> TRIED. TESTED. TRUSTED. <https://redhat.com/trusted>
> @redhatnews <https://twitter.com/redhatnews>   Red Hat <https://www.linkedin.com/company/red-hat>   Red Hat <https://www.facebook.com/RedHatInc>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 03:54:01PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> > >
>> > > > One more thing could be automatically figuring out best values
>> based on
>> > > > libosinfo-provided data.
>> > > >
>> > > > 2) Policies
>> > > >
>> > > > Lot of the time there are parts of the domain definition that need
>> to be
>> > > > added, but nobody really cares about them.  Sometimes it's enough to
>> > > > have few templates, another time you might want to have a policy
>> > > > per-scenario and want to combine them in various ways.  For example
>> with
>> > > > the data provided by point 1).
>> > > >
>> > > > For example if you want PCI-Express, you need the q35 machine type,
>> but
>> > > > you don't really want to care about the machine type.  Or you want
>> to
>> > > > use SPICE, but you don't want to care about adding QXL.
>> > > >
>> > > > What if some of these policies could be specified once (using some
>> DSL
>> > > > for example), and used by virtuned to merge them in a unified and
>> > > > predictable way?
>> > > >
>> > > > 3) Abstracting the XML
>> > > >
>> > > > This is probably just usable for stateless apps, but it might happen
>> > > > that some apps don't really want to care about the XML at all.  They
>> > > > just want an abstract view of the domain, possibly add/remove a
>> device
>> > > > and that's it.  We could do that as well.  I can't really tell how
>> much
>> > > > of a demand there is for it, though.
>> > >
>> > > It is safe to say that applications do not want to touch XML at all.
>> > > Any non-trivial application has created an abstraction around XML,
>> > > so that they have an API to express what they want, rather than
>> > > manipulating of strings to format/parse XML.
>> > >
>> >
>> > Sure, this was just meant to be a question as to whether it's worth
>> > pursuing or not.  You make a good point on why it is not (at least for
>> > existing apps).
>> >
>> > However, since this was optional, the way this would look without the
>> > XML abstraction is that both input and output would be valid domain
>> > definitions, ultimately resulting in something similar to virt-xml with
>> > the added benefit of applying a policy from a file/string either
>> > supplied by the application itself.  Whether that policy was taken from
>> > a common repository of such knowledge is orthogonal to this idea.  Since
>> > you would work with the same data, the upgrade could be incremental as
>> > you'd only let virtuned fill in values for new options and could slowly
>> > move on to using it for some pre-existing ones.  None of the previous
>> > approaches did this, if I'm not mistaken.  Of course it gets more
>> > difficult when you need to expose all the bits libvirt does and keep
>> > them in sync (as you write below).
>>
>> That has implications for how mgmt app deals with XML. Nova has object
>> models for representing XML in memory, but it doesn't aim to have
>> loss-less roundtrip from parse -> object -> format. So if Nova gets
>> basic XML from virttuned, parses it into its object to let it set
>> more fields and then formats it again, chances are it will have lost
>> a bunch of stuff from virttuned. Of course if you know about this
>> need upfront you can design the application such that it can safely
>> round-trip, but this is just example of problem with integrating to
>> existing apps.
>>
>> The other thing that concerns is that there are dependancies between
>> different bits of XML for a given device. ie if feature X is set to
>> a certain value, that prevents use of feature Y. So if virttuned
>> sets feature X, but  the downstream application uses feature Y, the
>> final result can be incompatible. The application won't know this
>> because it doesn't control what stuff virttuned would be setting.
>> This can in turn cause ordering constraints.
>>
>> eg the application needs to say that virtio-net is being used, then
>> virttuned can set some defaults like enabling vhost-net, and then
>> the application can fill in more bits that it cares about. Or if
>> we let virttuned go first, setting virtio-net model + vhost-net,
>> then application wants to change model to e1000e, it has to be
>> aware that it must now delete the vhost-net bit that virtuned
>> added. This ends up being more complicated that just ignoring
>> virttuned and coding up use of vhost-net in application code.
>>
>>
>> > > This is the same kind of problem we faced wrt libvirt-gconfig and
>> > > libvirt-gobject usage from virt-manager - it has an extensive code
>> > > base that already works, and rewriting it to use something new
>> > > is alot of work for no short-term benefit. libvirt-gconfig/gobject
>> > > were supposed to be the "easy" bits for virt-manager to adopt, as
>> > > they don't really include much logic that would step on virt-manager's
>> > > toes. libvirt-designer was going to be a very opinionated library
>> > > and in retrospective that makes it even harder to consider adopting
>> > > it for usage in virt-manager, as it'll have signficant liklihood
>> > > of making functionally significant changes in behaviour.
>> > >
>> >
>> > The initial idea (which I forgot to mention) was that all the decisions
>> > libvirt currently does (so that it keeps the guest ABI stable) would be
>> > moved into data (let's say some DSL) and it could then be switched or
>> > adjusted if that's not what the mgmt app wants (on a per-definition
>> > basis, of course).  I didn't feel very optimistic about the upstream
>> > acceptance for that idea, so I figured that there could be something
>> > that lives beside libvirt, helps with some policies if requested and
>> > then the resulting XML could be fed into libvirt for determining the
>> > rest.
>>
>> I can't even imagine how we would go about encoding the stable guest
>> ABI logic libvirt does today in data !
>>
>> >
>> > > There's also the problem with use of native libraries that would
>> > > impact many apps. We only got OpenStack to grudgingly allow the
>> >
>> > By native you mean actual binary libraries or native to the OpenStack
>> > code as in python module?  Because what I had in mind for this project
>> > was a python module with optional wrapper for REST API.
>>
>> I meant native binary libraries. ie openstack is not happy in general
>> with adding dependancies on new OS services, because there's a big
>> time lag for getting them into all distros. By comparison a pure
>> python library, they can just handle automatically in their deployment
>> tools, just pip installing on any OS distro straight from pypi. This
>> is what made use of libosinfo a hard sell in Nova.
>>
>> The same thing is seen with Go / Rust where some applications have
>> decided they're better of actually re-implementing the libvirt RPC
>> protocol in Go / Rust rather than use the libvirt.so client. I think
>> this is a bad tradeoff in general, but I can see why they like it
>>
>> Regards,
>> Daniel
>> --
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