Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] RFC: use a slirp helper process

From: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau(a)redhat.com&gt; I am throwing this away for discussions, and early feedback. With the upcoming release of libslirp[1], we have an opportunity to run SLIRP networking in a separate process. This will allow for stricter security policies for both qemu & slirp, as slirp is notoriously not very safe (discussed on ML, various CVEs, and even the code says so explicitly in the comments), yet people rely on it regularly.

For network type "user", libvirt could spawn an helper process (an experimental version is [2]). It would setup a socket pair between qemu and the helper and use -net socket. qemu could then be built without libslirp! (imho, qemu should deprecate built-in -net user support, and doesn't need to grow its own sub-process handling) This libvirt patch is a bit rough, I am not sure where things should go. In particular, how to manage the subprocesses properly (security aspects, and lifecycle etc), and how to deal with migration (prevent migrating from non-helper to helper version etc). It seems guestfwd has been non-functional for a while. This is also something that the current experimental helper doesn't support atm. Doing all the various "channel" types that libvirt/qemu support would be tedious, and probably unnecessary. But the underlying libslirp library support redirections the same way qemu does today, so it could be added if necessary. At this point, the slirp-helper doesn't handle migration. But is it really worth it? From a guest POV, it would look like packet lost or disconnection. Adding migration handling is possible, to avoid a disconnection event. How should it be done? via a libvirt provided socket for storage? via its own file transferred by libvirt? via qemu somehow (qemu wouldn't really know about the external process but would copy around the migration bits?). Does the helper need to have a "standard" & capabilities, similar to what is proposed for vhost-user [3]? This would allow for easier competing implementation to emerge (I have plans in mind, not using libslirp). Thanks for the feedback! [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp [2] https://github.com/elmarco/libslirp-rs [3] https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=blob;f=docs/interop/vhost-user.json Signed-off-by: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau(a)redhat.com&gt; --- m4/virt-driver-qemu.m4 | 5 ++ src/qemu/libvirtd_qemu.aug | 1 + src/qemu/qemu.conf | 3 ++ src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c | 6 +++ src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.h | 1 + src/qemu/qemu_command.c | 38 +++++++++++--- src/qemu/qemu_command.h | 3 +- src/qemu/qemu_conf.c | 7 ++- src/qemu/qemu_conf.h | 1 + src/qemu/qemu_domain.c | 11 ++++ src/qemu/qemu_domain.h | 3 ++ src/qemu/qemu_hotplug.c | 5 +- src/qemu/qemu_interface.c | 80 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ src/qemu/qemu_interface.h | 6 +++ src/qemu/test_libvirtd_qemu.aug.in | 1 + 15 files changed, 161 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)