Re: [Xen-users] xl and vifname

[Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>]

On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 15:10 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> Hi Wei,
> 
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 03:02:12PM +0000, Wei Liu wrote:
> > On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 14:31 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> > > Ditto here, being able to give a vif a specific name is required.
> > 
> > I'm a bit confused. xl parses 'vif' names for both HVM and PV guest. I
> > think you're using QEMU as network backend when you run HVM guest?
> > 
> > Well if backend is netback, the vif name is hardcoded as "vif%d.%d" --
> > see $KERNEL/drivers/net/xen-netback/interface.c:xenvif_alloc. xl has
> > nothing to do with this because the creation of vif is automatically
> > done when FE connects to BE.
> 
> I haven't followed the thread; I just saw it here on xen-devel that:
> 
> "You might want to communicate to xen-devel that you rely on
> [vifname support]"
> 
> Currently we use xm and xend, specify vifname in the PV guest's
> config in order to get a dom0 network interface of a given name.
> That functionality is required for us.
> 

(Well I'm not very familiar with xm code.)

Does xm serve your purpose -- specifying dom0 network interface of a
given name (rather then using vifX.X)?

If it can serve you purpose, can you verify which network backend you
are using by running following command:

$ ps aux | egrep '(qemu|net)'

If you get qemu-dm in the result, you're running QEMU. If you get
netback/0 in the result, you're running netback.

If you're running netback and you can use you preferred name for the
interface, then a similar fix for xl should be possible.

> If I misunderstood then I apologise; it seemed that it was being
> indicated that this functionality didn't exist with xm and there
> were no plans to provide it.
> 

I guess "xm" should be "xl". :)

I'm not a toolstack maintainer, I'm only trying to help. Maybe we can
wait for a proper answer from the maintainer.


Wei.