[systemd-devel] systemd-networkd questions

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi Dan,

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> 1) what is lacking in other userspace solutions (NetworkManager,
> ConnMan, wicked, initscripts, etc) that requires
> yet-another-network-daemon?

Without criticizing any of the existing solutions, some of the things
that motivated my interest in this is that I think we need: something
easily configured via plain configuration files by a sysadmin,
something that would take a limited amount of space (including its
dependencies) so it could be reasonably used in an initrd, something
which would be fast/efficient, so not e.g. calling out to external
tools/daemons for stuff like dhcp/ipv4ll.

Essentially, I see us taking over from what initscripts (and similar
solutions in various distributions) are currently doing, and
peacefully coexisting with connman and networkmanager for the
foreseeable future. Hopefully we'll manage to cooperate on overlapping
functionality, but I think it is a bit early in the game to start
discussing that yet.

> 2) do you expect that systemd-networkd will grow to include bridge,
> bond, and team setup?  how about other "enterprise"/"server" interface
> types like macvlan/vtap, tun/tap, gre, vxlan, ovs, etc?  All these are
> enterprise things that typically won't change during a specific bootup,
> but which static "servers" increasingly use.  If you don't expect these
> to be supported, why not?

Most of these things we expect to support eventually. We'll have to
discuss on a case-by-case precisely which ones.

> 3) Is there expected to be D-Bus interfaces for controlling or
> monitoring the network interfaces and configuration data?  If not, why
> not?

This is expected, yes. At first we will at least expose the state of
the networks/links, and later also allow them to be configured. All
this would be via dbus.

I'm tomegun on freenode in case you have any more questions.

Cheers,

Tom