On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 10:26:47AM -0700, Peter wrote:
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.
Another thing to consider is what virtualization management functionality should be implemented in cockpit? For example if cockpit would like to handle guest installation in a similar matter as virt-manager it has to be implemented somewhere. Libvirt doesn't have any API which would handle the whole installation process and IMHO it's out of scope of dbus or REST API. The installation process in virt-manager handles a lot of different aspects, for example it can create a new storage/pool, it can download vmlinuz/initrd from provided URL, it can mount an ISO image, etc. This logic has to be implemented somewhere and I don't think that cockpit is a right place. Currently there is command line tool virt-install which is part of virt-manager project that is able to handle all the installation aspects but that's not ideal for cockpit the same way ho virsh is not ideal. Another alternative way how to connect cockpit with libvirt could be to implement some intermediate application which would communicate directly with libvirt, would handle all the logic that is required by most of the management application and provide several ways how UI applications can communicate whit it. The benefit of this application would be that not only cockpit would use it but virt-manager could switch to it eventually and possibly virt-install as well. This would lead to a single project that provides virtualization management functionality that can be reused by other project or tools or simple scripts as well. Pavel
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.
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