On 8/15/22 10:11 AM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! I'm reading the libvirt network XML format documentation[1], and I can't figure out how to create a simple bridged network - no NAT, no routing, no OVS, no macvtap, etc. I.e., just a Linux bridge with a single physical interface attached.
None of the 3 scenarios listed for <forward mode='bridge'> describe the simple setup that I'm trying to create, so it looks like I'll need to create the bridge separately. (It's not hard to do, it just seems like such a weird gap the in the functionality.)
libvirt's virtual network driver historically only creates networks that don't touch (and potentially mess up) the existing host system network config. But attaching a physical host system ethernet to a bridge requires moving the ethernet device's IP config over to the bridge, so that was considered "out of scope" for libvirt's network driver. Back in 2008-2009, libvirt added an "interface driver" whose purpose was to configure/reconfigure host system network interfaces to, for example, attach a host ethernet to a bridge device, or add a vlan interface based on a host ethernet (and then attach that vlan interface to a bridge). This was initially supported on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL platforms using a (at the time new) library called netcf. After several years of floundering, I proposed in 2020 that we essentially admit failure and deprecate the netcf library (and libvirt's use of it). I don't have the energy to rehash the entire list of reasons here, but my message proposing the deprecation and listing all the reasons, is here: https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2020-December/212781.html These days (and even before, for the most part) if you want a bridge attached to a host system ethernet, it's recommended that you set that up using whatever host system network config you're using (e.g., NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, ifcfg files, /etc/network/interfaces file), and then either define your guest interfaces with <interface type='bridge'>, or if you want to use <interface type='network'> andrefer to that with a libvirt network name, create a libvirt network with <forward mode='bridge'> (which expects that a bridge device will have already been created in the host system network config).