systemd-networkd and network management plans

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 22.10.14 07:36, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 08:24:23PM -0400, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are
> > the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any?  What is the future of NM?
> 
> We'd really like to stop shipping the older network scripts, but there
> aren't any concrete related plans. See
> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1081999>.
> 
> 
> In the cloud SIG, we talked about making a generator for systemd which
> would take ifcfg-* style configuration scripts and make networkd
> configuration on the fly, but explicitly only covering a subset of
> options. But given all of the things to do, this hasn't risen in
> priority. <https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/14>

One major issue is also that networkd so far lacks a bus interface,
you cannot tell it to change configuration at runtime. Something like
"ifup" is not available. I mean, networkd is fully dynamic and
everything, but it only operates based on pre-defined configuration,
you cannot change what it is doing from the outside without changing
the configuration.

For many embedded and container setups the current feature set of
networkd is good enough, but without an equivalent for ifup/ifdown it
is simply not a suitable replacement for the networkign scripts yet.

Adding a bus API is high on our list though. The reason this is not
yet available is mostly that we care about the initrd and early-boot
usecase. Traditional dbus is not available there. Which means we'd
have to listen on an additional socket for dbus requests so that the
ifup/ifdown equivalent could work in that context too. We did this for
PID 1 itself, because we had to, but we wanted to avoid this for
networkd so far, given the perspective that with kdbus the whole
problem goes away entirely as IPC is then avilable from the first
instant of boot-up to the last of shutdown, and we can open up things
nicely then. 

Or in other words: before kdbus is a reality networkd won't be full
networking scripts replacement.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat