F20 System Wide Change: NetworkManager Bridging Support

[Jaroslav Reznik]

= Proposed System Wide Change: NetworkManager Bridging Support =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/NetworkManagerBridging

Change owner(s):  Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat dot com>, Pavel Šimerda 
<psimerda at redhat dot com>

NetworkManager should be able to configure bridge interfaces with commonly used 
options and recognize their existing configuration on startup without 
disrupting their operation.

== Detailed description ==
A bridge connects two or more physical or virtual network interfaces to allow 
network traffic to flow between the two interfaces at a low level. Bridging is 
commonly used to connect Virtual Machines to the outside world; a bridge 
interface is created, to which a physical interface (typically ethernet) is 
assigned as a slave, and a virtual interface (typically TAP) is created and 
also assigned to the bridge as a slave, and then given to the Virtual Machine. 
Thus traffic from one or more VMs can be combined and sent out of the machine 
via the physical interface.

This setup is currently done either manually using ifcfg files and ifup/ifdown, 
or by a tool like libvirt/netcf. NetworkManager should be able to configure 
bridge interfaces and their slaves with the same functionality as provided by 
libvirt, and should recognize and not disrupt existing bridge connections when 
it starts up.

== Scope ==
Proposal owners: development dcbw
Other developers: This feature requires changes to nm-applet (done), nm-
connection-editor (done), gnome-shell, gnome-control-center (in-progress) and 
KDE counterparts to expose bridge interfaces and their connection information 
in the user interface. NetworkManager also needs updates to implement the 
proposed changes (mostly done).

This Change Proposal has been communicated with Wrangler before the Submission 
deadline.