This patch adds the capability for virtual guests to do IPv6
communication via a virtual network interface with no IPv6 (gateway)
addresses specified. This capability has always been enabled by
default for IPv4, but disabled for IPv6 for security concerns, and
because it requires the ip6tables command to be operational (which
isn't the case on a system with the ipv6 module completely disabled).
This patch adds a new attribute "ipv6" at the toplevel of a <network>
object. If ipv6='yes', the extra ip6tables rules required to permite
inter-guest communications are added when the network is started. If
it is 'no', or not present, those rules will not be added; thus the
default behavior doesn't change, so there should be no compatibility
issues with any existing installations.
Note that virtual guests cannot communication with the virtualization
host via this interface, because the following kernel tunable has
been set:
net.ipv6.conf.<bridge_interface_name>.disable_ipv6 = 1
This assures that the bridge interface will not have an IPv6
link-local (fe80::) address.
To control this behavior so that it is not enabled by default, the parameter
ipv6='yes' on the <network> statement has been added.
Documentation related to this patch has been updated.
The network schema has also been updated.
This fixes https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=609463
The problem was that, since a bridge always acquires the MAC address
of the connected interface with the numerically lowest MAC, as guests
are started and stopped, it was possible for the MAC address to change
over time, and this change in the network was being detected by
Windows 7 (it sees the MAC of the default route change), so on each
reboot it would bring up a dialog box asking about this "new network".
The solution is to create a dummy tap interface with a MAC guaranteed
to be lower than any guest interface's MAC, and attach that tap to the
bridge as soon as it's created. Since all guest MAC addresses start
with 0xFE, we can just generate a MAC with the standard "0x52, 0x54,
0" prefix, and it's guaranteed to always win (physical interfaces are
never connected to these bridges, so we don't need to worry about
competing numerically with them).
Note that the dummy tap is never set to IFF_UP state - that's not
necessary in order for the bridge to take its MAC, and not setting it
to UP eliminates the clutter of having an (eg) "virbr0-nic" displayed
in the output of the ifconfig command.
I chose to not auto-generate the MAC address in the network XML
parser, as there are likely to be consumers of that API that don't
need or want to have a MAC address associated with the
bridge.
Instead, in bridge_driver.c when the network is being defined, if
there is no MAC, one is generated. To account for virtual network
configs that already exist when upgrading from an older version of
libvirt, I've added a %post script to the specfile that searches for
all network definitions in both the config directory
(/etc/libvirt/qemu/networks) and the state directory
(/var/lib/libvirt/network) that are missing a mac address, generates a
random address, and adds it to the config (and a matching address to
the state file, if there is one).
docs/formatnetwork.html.in: document <mac address.../>
docs/schemas/network.rng: add nac address to schema
libvirt.spec.in: %post script to update existing networks
src/conf/network_conf.[ch]: parse and format <mac address.../>
src/libvirt_private.syms: export a couple private symbols we need
src/network/bridge_driver.c:
auto-generate mac address when needed,
create dummy interface if mac address is present.
tests/networkxml2xmlin/isolated-network.xml
tests/networkxml2xmlin/routed-network.xml
tests/networkxml2xmlout/isolated-network.xml
tests/networkxml2xmlout/routed-network.xml: add mac address to some tests
Ján Tomko