Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/4] net-bridge: rootless bridge support for qemu

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Avi Kivity wrote:
>> If we make this easy for management software to do, they're more 
>> likely to do the right thing.
>
> But we're forcing our style of security management on them.  How to 
> store permissions is the management system's job (and for a clu^Houd, 
> it will typically be stored in a central database, not be scattered 
> around /etc).
>
> Again, IMO we should stick to making a guest work, and leave all the 
> glue to management.

That's short sighted.  If we just focus on "making a guest work" we'll 
end up with crappy interfaces that cripple management tools.  If users 
are constantly struggling to do even the simplest things with qemu, then 
it doesn't matter how well our "guest works".  No one will use it.

I think we absolutely have to think about the full stack and how all the 
pieces interact.  There are definitely problems in the stack right now.  
Security is the one I'm trying to address in this series.  If you cannot 
launch a reasonable configured qemu from the command line as an 
unprivileged user, there's really no hope that we can expect a 
management tool to do that.

Again, there are no shortage of existence proofs of this (beyond 
libvirt).  I suspect there isn't a management tool out there that does 
the right thing today.

-- 
Regards,

Anthony Liguori