netplan-developers team mailing list archive

[Lukas Märdian <lukas.maerdian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

+CC Steve, for schema review


Hi Brian,

Am 08.02.22 um 00:24 schrieb Brian Turek:
> Greetings,
>
> I've been experimenting using netplan to control Open vSwitch (OVS) 
> bridges/interfaces and am wondering if there is any appetite to add 
> support for gretap tunnels via native OVS commands? It's a little 
> tricky to implement as the interface *must* be attached to an OVS 
> bridge and it does not appear that there is a fool-proof method of 
> linking a tunnel to a bridge.  For example, VLAN interfaces have the 
> "link" attribute whereas the only existing method of linking a tunnel 
> would be via the bridge's "interfaces" attribute.
As you already found, we're currently supporting (basic) configuration 
of OVS as well as setting up GRE tunnels. So the combination of both 
(GRE on top of OVS, e.g. for offloading) would definitely make sense and 
improve our overall Open vSwitch offering. If you want to work on that, 
that would be appreciated!
> I looked through the netplan code to see if there was any way to abuse 
> the "other-config" attribute to get this to work but the "add-port" 
> method of ovs-vsctl is gated solely behind patch ports.
>
> I'm willing to spend some time trying to implement this (I submitted 2 
> minor patches recently!) but am looking for some direction on how to 
> firmly establish the br<->tunnel linkage before beginning.

Thanks for that! I really liked the two PRs that you've submitted 
recently – nicely structured and good test coverage!

As you mentioned above using the bridge's "interfaces" stanza to link a 
GRE tunnel would be one way of doing it that does not need 
changes/additions to the YAML schema. That could work as we can deduce 
when a tunnel is an interface to an OVS bridge (i.e. has some 
"openvswitch": {} settings) and handle that implicitly. But I agree that 
this isn't fool-proof and could be confused easily.

Another idea that comes to mind would be to add a new "openvswitch": { 
"link": "ovs-br0" } stanza to a tunnel definition. This YAML schema 
would show explicitly that this is an "OVS-tunnel" that is liked to a 
given (OVS-)bridge. What do you think about that?

We usually want to consult Steve for such schema definitions, so I've 
put him on CC.

Cheers,

     Lukas

> - Brian

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