[libvirt] Remotable Libvirt
Hi Everyone,
We are working towards building on the virtualization management
functionality in cockpit (http://cockpit-project.org/) and wanted to get
some feedback on the best way to integrate with libvirt.
As a quick overview, cockpit aims to talk to existing remotable system
APIs. Usually these API’s take the form of dbus, REST or executable
commands. The majority of cockpit is implemented in javascript. There is
no cockpit backend that knows how to change a hostname for example. The
cockpit backend knows how to handle a dbus payload. The javascript
running in the users browser knows how to use the systemd dbus API at
org.freedesktop.hostname1 to manage the system hostname.
Right now some of the basics have been implemented by spawning commands
on the system. This isn't ideal because it involves parsing / screen
scraping output and doesn't support receiving events so we have to poll
(ei run the command again) to keep the UI up to date.
As far as I know libvirt doesn't currently have a remoteable API. It
does have a daemon that communicates with clients via a XDR RPC.
(https://libvirt.org/internals/rpc.html) However from what I'm hearing
the RPC is considered an internal implementation and shouldn't be used
by external applications. Is that still the case? Is there any chance of
getting talking the daemon directly using the XDR standard for a subset
of methods blessed as part of the externally supported API?
An alternative is to implement a standards based remotable API, using
something like dbus or REST, that can be used by external applications.
I imagine that this would be at a bit of a higher level than the current
RPC and contain at least some of the logic around the actions it
performs rather than being a direct passthrough to the daemon.
Of course that is a pretty big undertaking and would, in my opinion,
only be worth it if there is broader interest in the community and use
cases beyond what cockpit would like to.