Re: Issue 90 Further Clarifications
On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 11:20:57 -0600, Dustan B Helm wrote:
We plan to support NFS protocol according to the example XML from
Issue 90
<http://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues/90>;. Since there is already
support for network disks of different protocol types and host information,
we think that the only new XML information we will add is an <nfs> element
which will be a subelement of <source>, with attributes “user” and “group”
(both strings). This element will only be generated if the source protocol
is “nfs” and we assume that both “user” and “group” will be required.
Here is the XML example given in the issue for reference:
<disk type='network' device='disk'>
<driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
<source protocol='nfs' name='PATH'>
<host name='example.com' port='2049'/
<nfs user='USER' group='GROUP'/>
</source>
<target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
</disk>
Sounds reasonable to me. We tend to name elements equivalent to <nfs>
you propose by their purpose (such as <auth> <initiator> <cookies> for
other protocols) but in this case I don't have a better suggestion so
going with <nfs> is reasonable.
Since you are proposing 'user' and 'group' to be strings while qemu
accepts only numeric UID/GID, please use the same conversion code we
have for the <inituser> and <initgroup> values in regards to forcing
numeric value to skip being interpreded:
https://www.libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#container-boot
What do you think of these proposed changes? Should either of the
<nfs>
tag's string attributes be optional?
In this case qemu doesn't mandate the use of the user/group field so you
can make the nfs element and both user and group optional especially
since it's only a workaround for the broken-by design NFS "security".
You can claim that a hypervisor-default uid/gid is used when the fields
are not present.
You also probably want to mention in the documentation that in most
cases qemu is running as non-root and thus doesn't have access to
privileged ports. Thus the export has to use the 'insecure' option to
allow non-privileged ports.
One further thing possibly worth mentioning is that the name=''
attribute starts with the NFS export name.