[virt-tools-list] [libvirt] Project for profiles and defaults for libvirt domains

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 09:40:40AM +0100, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 03:10:12PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > - I understand OpenStack has some really sensible and wisely chosen
> > >  and/or tested default values.
> > 
> > In terms of default devices and OS specific choices, OpenStack's
> > decisions have been largely inspired by previous work in oVirt
> > and / or virt-manager. So there's obviously overlap in the
> > conceptual area, but there's also plenty that is very specific
> > to OpenStack - untangling the two extract the common bits from
> > the app specific bits is hard. 
> 
> This would be handled by the application specific policies.  The
> virtuned will have some reasonable defaults that are known to work in
> most cases and suits the majority of users, but it's clear that
> sometimes you need some specific defaults and you would provide them
> via the application policy.
> 
> For example, to create a XML for windows guest the virtuned would not
> probably select virtio devices because there are no drivers for them
> in the standard windows installation, however, some management
> application may have customized preinstalled disk images or customized
> ISO images or it may be able to provide the drivers any other way, so
> they would specify in the application policy that for windows guest
> virtuned should use virtio as a default device model.

As soon as we talk about configuring hardware specific to a guest
OS, then that is in scope of existing libosinfo project, not something
we should create a new project for.


> This is probably the hardest part of creating higher level API on top
> of libvirt, not every project may be willing to rewrite their existing
> code.  On the other hand, I know that for example Cockpit would benefit
> from the virtuned providing this functionality via REST API.
> 
> It's a chicken and egg problem, but if we can gather input from all the
> existing projects that have their own implementation and figure out how
> to make virtuned usable for all of them they might consider to start
> using it.

I don't doubt that Cockpit would like like, but based on previous efforts
we've made I'm sceptical that anything beyond Cockpit would use any new
API. 

Regards,
Daniel
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