On 7/23/19 10:02 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
The libvirtd daemon provides the traditional libvirt experience
where
all the drivers are in a single daemon, and is accessible over both
local UNIX sockets and remote IP sockets.
In the new world we're having a set of per-driver daemons which will
primarily be accessed locally via their own UNIX sockets.
We still, however, need to allow for case of applications which will
connect to libvirt remotely. These remote connections can be done as
TCP/TLS sockets, or by SSH tunnelling to the UNIX socket.
In the later case, the old libvirt.so clients will only know about
the path to the old libvirtd socket /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock,
and not the new driver sockets /var/run/libvirt/virtqemud-sock.
It is also not desirable to expose the main driver specific daemons
over IP directly to minimize their attack service.
Thus the virtproxyd daemon steps into place, to provide TCP/TLS sockets,
and back compat for the old libvirtd UNIX socket path(s). It will then
forward all RPC calls made to the appropriate driver specific daemon.
Essentially it is equivalent to the old libvirtd with absolutely no
drivers registered except for the remote driver (and other stateless
drivers in libvirt.so).
We could have modified libvirtd so none of the drivers are registed
to get the same end result. We could even add a libvirtd.conf parameter
to control whether the drivers are loaded to enable users to switch back
to the old world if we discover bugs in the split-daemon model. Using a
new daemon though has some advantages
- We can make virtproxyd and the virtXXXd per-driver daemons all
have "Conflicts: libvirtd.service" in their systemd unit files.
This will guarantee that libvirtd is never started at the same
time, as this would result in two daemons running the same driver.
Fortunately drivers use locking to protect themselves, but it is
better to avoid starting a daemon we know will conflict.
- It allows us to break CLI compat to remove the --listen parameter.
Both listen_tcp and listen_tls parameters in /etc/libvirtd/virtd.conf
will default to zero. Either TLS or TCP can be enabled exclusively
though virtd.conf without requiring the extra step of adding --listen.
- It allows us to set a strict SELinux policy over virtproxyd. For
back compat the libvirtd policy must continue to allow all drivers
to run. We can't easily give a second policy to libvirtd which
locks it down. By introducing a new virtproxyd we can set a strict
policy for that daemon only.
Reading this paragraph reminds me that the apparmor profiles will need adjusting
too.
Regards,
Jim