[virt-tools-list] [PATCH 0/2] Show IP address in virt-manager

[Cole Robinson]

On 03/02/2018 01:27 AM, Dylan Stephano-Shachter wrote:
> I have added a feature to show a VM's first IP address next to the VM state (Running, etc.). This feature can be toggled in the preferences menu and is disabled by default. It uses the qemu-guest agent to query the IP address.
> 
> Dylan Stephano-Shachter (2):
>   show the first ip address of running vms
>   add preferences option to enable 'show first ip'
> 

Thanks for the patches. Interesting idea. We are definitely overdue for
exposing VM IP address somewhere in the UI

It's kind of difficult to get the implementation right though. We try
really hard to avoid repeated libvirt API calls in the code, because
often we connect to libvirt over slow remote connections and too many
API calls make the app sluggish. Ideally what we would do is cache this
type of info at domain startup time, or first access, similarish to how
we handle vmmDomain.get_domain_capabilities or
vmmDomain.managedsave_supported.

But this case is different since it's runtime state that can change,
maybe the VM network goes down, or more likely we try to request info
before the domain is fully up and network has been initialized. So I
dunno, do we need a way to let the user request refreshing this info?
I'd need to play with it.

I think UI wise a simpler place to start to hash out some of these
issues is to add an IP Address field to the VM details page for each
particular network device. Possibly adding a small refresh button next
to that field for the user to request fetching latest data. Those pages
have less performance constraints than the manager window. I can help
work out the details for this too if you come up with a first pass

As for implementing this in the manager, one suggestion is that rather
than extending Preferences, map the gsettings field to Manager->View->IP
Address, following how the Graph options work. It could even add a new
IP Address column, not sure offhand if that's better though

Thanks,
Cole