Hi
For a long time, NetworkManager handled only wifi and simpler connection needs and although it now has support for bridging, bonding etc, it seems not integrated with GNOME very much.
Meanwhile, systemd-networkd handles a lot more of that but doesn't handle wifi (yet?) and I am not sure what the plans are between NM and systemd-networkd to avoid code duplication.
Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any? What is the future of NM?
Rahul
On Fri, 2014-09-12 at 20:24 -0400, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi
For a long time, NetworkManager handled only wifi and simpler connection needs and although it now has support for bridging, bonding etc, it seems not integrated with GNOME very much.
Meanwhile, systemd-networkd handles a lot more of that but doesn't handle wifi (yet?) and I am not sure what the plans are between NM and systemd-networkd to avoid code duplication.
Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any? What is the future of NM?
From the NM side, we're continuing the push that started a couple years
ago to make NM a cooperative citizen by listening for external changes, by continuing to reduce the size and dependency set of the core NM daemon, and by making many previous dependencies optional (dbus-daemon, PolicyKit, interface-specific daemons). Many of these features already landed in NM 0.9.10, and many more are planned for NM 1.0.
I cannot speak to the systemd plans, though NM is investigating the DHCP/IPv4LL library code (that was ported from ConnMan over to systemd) to replace dhclient/dhcpcd. My understanding is that systemd-networkd will never depend on external libraries or daemons, which somewhat limits the types of interfaces that it can work with.
Dan
On Fri, 12.09.14 20:24, Rahul Sundaram (metherid@gmail.com) wrote:
Hi
For a long time, NetworkManager handled only wifi and simpler connection needs and although it now has support for bridging, bonding etc, it seems not integrated with GNOME very much.
Meanwhile, systemd-networkd handles a lot more of that but doesn't handle wifi (yet?) and I am not sure what the plans are between NM and systemd-networkd to avoid code duplication.
That is correct, networkd does not handle wifi, and nobody is working on it.
With networkd we mostly focus on the embedded, initrd, server, container usecases, but not so much the desktop usecases. That said I know that people are interested in having networkd cover wifi too, so I am not sure what the future will bring.
Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any? What is the future of NM?
Currently there are no plans.
At this time, networkd is an option in Fedora, not more, and we have no plans to propose it as default, and especially not for the workstation flavour.
Lennart
On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 08:24:23PM -0400, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any? What is the future of NM?
We'd really like to stop shipping the older network scripts, but there aren't any concrete related plans. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1081999.
In the cloud SIG, we talked about making a generator for systemd which would take ifcfg-* style configuration scripts and make networkd configuration on the fly, but explicitly only covering a subset of options. But given all of the things to do, this hasn't risen in priority. https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/14
Another approach might be to use the NetworkManager "run once" mode https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=863515, especially if that can be extended to both static and dhcp addresses (with nothing else fancy).
On Wed, 22.10.14 07:36, Matthew Miller (mattdm@fedoraproject.org) wrote:
On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 08:24:23PM -0400, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Do we still ship the older network scripts in Fedora workstation? What are the plans to integrate systemd-networkd if any? What is the future of NM?
We'd really like to stop shipping the older network scripts, but there aren't any concrete related plans. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1081999.
In the cloud SIG, we talked about making a generator for systemd which would take ifcfg-* style configuration scripts and make networkd configuration on the fly, but explicitly only covering a subset of options. But given all of the things to do, this hasn't risen in priority. https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/14
One major issue is also that networkd so far lacks a bus interface, you cannot tell it to change configuration at runtime. Something like "ifup" is not available. I mean, networkd is fully dynamic and everything, but it only operates based on pre-defined configuration, you cannot change what it is doing from the outside without changing the configuration.
For many embedded and container setups the current feature set of networkd is good enough, but without an equivalent for ifup/ifdown it is simply not a suitable replacement for the networkign scripts yet.
Adding a bus API is high on our list though. The reason this is not yet available is mostly that we care about the initrd and early-boot usecase. Traditional dbus is not available there. Which means we'd have to listen on an additional socket for dbus requests so that the ifup/ifdown equivalent could work in that context too. We did this for PID 1 itself, because we had to, but we wanted to avoid this for networkd so far, given the perspective that with kdbus the whole problem goes away entirely as IPC is then avilable from the first instant of boot-up to the last of shutdown, and we can open up things nicely then.
Or in other words: before kdbus is a reality networkd won't be full networking scripts replacement.
Lennart
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