[lxc-users] [Wishlist] libvir and lxc and confusion? ? ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 10:24:25AM -0500, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> 
> The main goal behind this todo item was to get liblxc support into
> OpenStack which is now being done in a different way (directly as an
> OpenStack plugin, bypassing the libvirt layer which is more suited to
> handling VMs than containers).
> 
> I think I've already said so here a dozen time but let's clarify it
> again, libvirt-lxc and lxc are entirely different projects which
> unfortunately happen to share a name, there's not a single line of code
> in common between those two and their feature set is widely different
> too.

The feature set isn't actually very different - there's probably a
good 90% overlap in features. The main difference is more on the
architectural side with libvirt having a central stateful daemon
with single world view of all containers, where as sf.net lxc tools
can be used in isolation from other apps if desired.

> While it'd be nice to have libvirt-lxc be based on liblxc, that doesn't
> seem to be the direction that project is currently heading towards.

There are both pluses & minuses to having libvirt use liblxc. The
libvirt codebase has alot of code sharing between different drivers,
in particular the LXC + KVM/QEMU drivers share alot of core pieces
of infrastructure. If libvirt used liblxc it would loose the ability
to share so much code with with libvirt drivers like QEMU. Since the
kernels' interfaces for setting up containers are pretty straightfoward
on balance we decided using liblxc would not be a net-win for libvirt

> Having a second libvirt driver would be an option but given that
> OpenStack is now working towards a container API which will let us get
> direct LXC integration, there's not many insentive for us to divert time
> from other work in order to work on such a plugin.

Regards,
Daniel
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