ZFS on Linux support in libvirt

Some time ago I wrote about ZFS storage driver for libvirt. At that time it worked on FreeBSD only because ZFS on Linux had some minor limitations, mainly some command line arguments for generating machine-readable output.

As of version 0.6.4 ZFS on Linux actually supports all we need. And I pushed the libvirt related changes today.

It will be available in 1.3.2, but if you're interested, you're welcome to play around with that right now checking out libvirt from git.

Again, most of the usage details are available in my older post. Also, feel free to poke me either on twitter or through email novel@freebds.org (note the intentional typo). It could take some time to get a reply though.

sriovmng: a tool to manage SR-IOV devices on Linux

Last few months I've been working with the SR-IOV devices on Linux, specifically with OpenStack. And while everything that is needed for day to day operations with SR-IOV devices could be done through the sysfs, I'm having a hard time remembering all the proper paths there. So I decided to write a tool I called sriovmng that will be save me from direct sysfs operations.

This tool supports the following operations:

• Listing all the SR-IOV interfaces
• Querying information about specific SR-IOV devices to show its device and vendor ids, number of VFs configured and VFs PCI address
• Querying interface name by its PCI address and vice versa
• Setting a number of VFs for device

The tool is written in Python and is available here:

https://github.com/novel/sriovmng

It could be installed using python setup.py install. I haven't yet uploaded it to pypi because I need to add some unit tests for it and also would appreciate if somebody could give it some real testing as well. Please let me know if you'd like to test it and if I could provide any help.

I have tested it myself with the ixgbe driver and it appears to work fine with this setup.

Treating security loosely

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but anyway sometimes I get really surprised how people treat security these days.

I was going to try gitflow (which seems to be quite interesting thing to adopt by the way) today and was reading documentation on the installation process. Believe it or not, the suggested installation way on linux system is:


$ wget --no-check-certificate -q -O - https://github.com/nvie/gitflow/raw/develop/contrib/gitflow-installer.sh | sudo sh


Yes, you're right, it's like that: downloading a random script from the internet and executing it from 'root' without extra checks. Certainly, it's up to you if you trust the source and sure that it doesn't have any malicios code (generally, it's better not to trust). But anyway, such installation schema should be improved:

• SSL verification shouldn't be disabled, so you're sure that you're actually downloading your file from github, not from some source identifying itself as github


• Control checksums should be provided or the file should be signed with gpg to make sure you're downloading exactly the same thing as author uploaded

Without it executing such a command seems to be plain dangerous.