[Libvir] just a question about libvirt evolution
Hello, Several major modifications will appear this year in future Xen releases (3.0.3 and 3.0.4) that may have impacts on libvirt. These modifications (see xen roadmap edited by Ian Pratt in july 2006) are : - Introduction of XML-RPC, - Xen configuration files in XML format, - Suppression of S-Expressions, - etc.. What is the libvirt position about these points ? Is the initial goal of libvirt to mask Xen evolutions will be always possible ? The most problematic problem would be the configurations files in XML format. Libvirt already supports its own XML format of configuration files. It seems to me that it would be interesting to use the same XML format (or a compatible format) in libvirt and in Xen. Is there a plan in this direction ? Thanks.
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 05:27:47PM +0200, Philippe Berthault wrote:
Hello,
Several major modifications will appear this year in future Xen releases (3.0.3 and 3.0.4) that may have impacts on libvirt. These modifications (see xen roadmap edited by Ian Pratt in july 2006) are : - Introduction of XML-RPC, - Xen configuration files in XML format, - Suppression of S-Expressions, - etc..
What is the libvirt position about these points ?
Follow, if possible guide, but keep backward compatibility :-)
Is the initial goal of libvirt to mask Xen evolutions will be always possible ?
The only risk I see right now, is about the XML format, I raised the point here in Ottawa (OLS) and the answer texto was "we don't see why libvirt XML format should be different from Xen one" my own biased viewpoint is that I don't see why Xen upcoming XML format should be different from libvirt one, but there is some hopes :-)
The most problematic problem would be the configurations files in XML format. Libvirt already supports its own XML format of configuration files. It seems to me that it would be interesting to use the same XML format (or a compatible format) in libvirt and in Xen. Is there a plan in this direction ?
I raised the issue publicly, got the previous answer, I'm afraid they didn't look at it yet, and could not get any technical answer at this point, but we have a statement to this effect. The best you can do is also give feedback to the Xen guys to this intent :-) Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat http://redhat.com/ veillard@redhat.com | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 05:27:47PM +0200, Philippe Berthault wrote:
Hello,
Several major modifications will appear this year in future Xen releases (3.0.3 and 3.0.4) that may have impacts on libvirt. These modifications (see xen roadmap edited by Ian Pratt in july 2006) are : - Introduction of XML-RPC, - Xen configuration files in XML format, - Suppression of S-Expressions, - etc..
What is the libvirt position about these points ?
When XenD supports XML-RPC we'll definitely be creating another driver in libvirt to support the XML-RPC apis. We will also keep the existing drivers which talk SEXPR, since we need libvirt to be usable against older 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 versionf of Xen. None of this should be too difficult since DV anticipated these kind of changes when libvirt was designed
Is the initial goal of libvirt to mask Xen evolutions will be always possible ?
Yes, a core goal of libvirt is to isolate the applications from instability & changes in the upstream Xen APIs. So the application should not notice any difference when libvit is talking SEXPR to XenD, vs talking XML-RPC. The new XML-RPC api, however, will introduce new capabilities which were not possible with older SEXPR apis. For example, it will allow us to authenticate with XenD over the HTTP connection. So we might gainthe ability to manage a Xen box remotely - there is no authentication support with SEXPR so this will never be possible with old API. So, in summary we maintain backwards-compatability - an app using libvirt against xen-3.0.2 should work unchanged on xen-3.0.3 or later. Going in the other direction may-or-may not be possible depending on whether your app is using any of the features new in 3.0.3
The most problematic problem would be the configurations files in XML format. Libvirt already supports its own XML format of configuration files. It seems to me that it would be interesting to use the same XML format (or a compatible format) in libvirt and in Xen. Is there a plan in this direction ?
The important thing to note is that the Xen XML format will contain *huge* amounts of information, much of which is very specific to Xen. libVirt is intended to be Hypervisor agnostic, so there is information in the Xen XML which will not neccessarily be made available via the libvirt XML. The information exposed with libvirt ought to be sufficient for the vast majority of high level management tools. It would be desirable if there was compatability between the XML formats. One way would be to define libvirt XML as the 'core data set' and then the Xen specific bits could be added as elements as tags in a separate '<xen:...>' XML namespace. If this doesn't happen, I imagine it would be fairly straightforward to provide an XSLT stylesheet which tranlates between the two formats - libvirt would be doing this internally anyway. Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|
participants (3)
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Daniel P. Berrange -
Daniel Veillard -
Philippe Berthault