Proposed F19 Feature: NetworkManager Bridging Support

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2013-01-31 at 16:41 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jaroslav Reznik (jreznik at redhat.com) said: 
> > = Features/NetworkManagerBridging =
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NetworkManagerBridging
> > 
> > Feature owner(s):  Pavel Šimerda <psimerda at redhat.com>, Dan Williams <dcbw 
> > 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. 
> 
> This (and the bonding feature) could stand to be more clearly stated how it
> differs from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NMEnterpriseNetworking.
> From reading it, it implies that it's making the configuration of them
> first-class NM citizens throughout NM's interfaces, as opposed to just
> handling manually configured ones.

Yeah, pretty much it, though the Bridging feature is also about actually
implementing bridging support.  Bonding was already done a while back,
so the F19 feature is about making it more cooperative.  I'll see what I
can do to clarify.

Dan