Re: plug pre-created tap devices to libvirt guests

On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 4:03 PM Laine Stump <lstump(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > > On 4/6/20 9:54 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 06, 2020 at 03:47:01PM +0200, Miguel Duarte de Mora Barroso wrote: > >> Hi all, > >> > >> I'm aware that it is possible to plug pre-created macvtap devices to > >> libvirt guests - tracked in RFE [0]. > >> > >> My interpretation of the wording in [1] and [2] is that it is also > >> possible to plug pre-created tap devices into libvirt guests - that > >> would be a requirement to allow kubevirt to run with less capabilities > >> in the pods that encapsulate the VMs. > >> > >> I took a look at the libvirt code ([3] & [4]), and, from my limited > >> understanding, I got the impression that plugging existing interfaces > >> via `managed='no' ` is only possible for macvtap interfaces. > > > No, it works for standard tap devices as well. > > > The reason the BZs and commit logs talk mostly about macvtap rather than > tap is because 1) that's what kubevirt people had asked for and 2) it > already *mostly* worked for tap devices, so most of the work was related > to macvtap (my memory is already fuzzy, but I think there were a couple > privileged operations we still tried to do for standard tap devices even > if they were precreated (standard disclaimer: I often misremember, so > this memory could be wrong! But definitely precreated tap devices do work). > It's been a while since I've started this thread, but lately I've understood better how tap devices work, and that new insight makes me wonder about a couple of things. Our ultimate goal In kubevirt is to consume a pre-created tap device by a kubernetes pod that doesn't have the NET_ADMIN capability. After looking at the current libvirt code, I don't think that is currently supported, since we'll *always* enter the `virNetDevTapCreate` function in [1] (I'm interested in the *tap* scenario). The tap device is effectively created in that function - [2] - by opening the clone device (/dev/net/tun), and calling `ioctl(fd, TUNSETIFF,...)` in it. AFAIK, both of those operations *require* the NET_ADMIN capability. If I'm correct, this means that the current libvirt implementation makes our goals impossible to achieve.