Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] Add virsh commands for virInterface* functions.

>>+ vshPrintExtra(ctl, "%-20s %-30s\n", _("Name"), _("MAC Address")); >>+ vshPrintExtra(ctl, >>"--------------------------------------------------\n"); >>+ >>+ for (i = 0; i < ifCount; i++) { >>+ virInterfacePtr iface = virInterfaceLookupByName(ctl->conn, >>ifNames[i]); >>+ >>+ /* this kind of work with interfaces is not atomic operation */ >>+ if (!iface) { >>+ free(ifNames[i]); >>+ continue; >>+ } >>+ >>+ vshPrint(ctl, "%-20s %-30s\n", >>+ virInterfaceGetName(iface), >>+ virInterfaceGetMACString(iface)); >>+ virInterfaceFree(iface); >>+ free(ifNames[i]); >>+ } >>+ free(ifNames); >>+ return TRUE; >>+} >> > > >This one should also take the flags --inactive / --all to allow >selection of offline NICs vs online NICs. Which reminds me that >the current public APIs are missing the equivalent for listing >inactive interfaces. eg, virConnectNumOfDefinedInterfaces and >virConnectListDefinedInterfaces > They're missing it because netcf is missing it, and I've so far just been implementing a conduit to channel netcf functionality through libvirt. The problem is that netcf currently interacts with the host OS in only two ways: 1) modifying the ifcfg-XXX config files, and 2) exec'ing the if-up and if-down scripts, and has nothing to get current state of the interface.

I talked to lutter about this and he agrees that this would be useful functionality to add to netcf, it just needs a person to do it (I'll even volunteer, just not this week!). Possibly we could add a flag now to the virConnectListInterfaces() API function in libvirt, in anticipation of a similar flag being added to netcf's ncf_list_interfaces() function. Is it too late to modify the API? (it is in a minor release, but nobody has used it yet. I guess the problem would be if someone happened to run libvirt 0.6.4 with an application that *did* use the new functions.). (Now I'm wondering why, when we thought of adding flags to all those other API functions, we didn't think to add flags to this one :-( )

Alternately (or maybe additionally) we can/should add a new function to return current state/statistics for interfaces. Along with throughput/packet counts, that API could return flags for the interface (all the flags shown in the output of ifconfig) as well as the current IP address(es). The virsh command could then get the list of interfaces, and iterate through looking at the state of each, eliminating the interfaces that weren't UP (or DOWN). > > >This command should be called 'start' for consistency with other commands. > >'create' is the command name we use for creating a transient object, >rather than starting a persistent object. > I see what you mean - "net-start" hooks up to virNetworkCreate(), so virInterfaceCreate() should be connected to "iface-start". It's a bit confusing, though, that the virsh commands don't match the libvirt API names. (I guess at least they should *consistently* mismatch! ;-)