[pve-devel] [RFC PATCH cluster/guest-common/qemu-server/container/manager] add backend profile support

[Dominik Csapak]

This series aims to provide profile support when creating guests (ct/vm)
so that users can reuse options without having to specify them every
time.

Sending as RFC because I don't quite like some things with the current
implementation and I'm not quite sure in which direction I should take
this. Also the GUI part isn't done yet and i wanted to see if the
direction is OK. (Sorry for the wall of text)

The major issues:

Using a single section config for both VMs and CTs make handling the
properties a bit weird. For now i prefix the options with "$type_"
so vm options are e.g. 'vm_ostype', 'vm_name', and so on while container
options are 'ct_ostype', 'ct_hostname', etc.

Using the same config/plugin system also makes using it a bit weird.
We have to register/init them in the api where they're used, but for the
cli we have to register only the available type and then init. This
makes it necessary to always set 'allow_unknown' while parsing the
config so that 'qm' doesn't trip over the container profiles...

A fix for both could be to separate the ct/vm configs into two files
(similar to how we did pci/usb mapping configs), that would fix the
prefixing, as well as the register/init issue (We have to have
separate APIs then ofc).

Another fix would be to extend the section config to allow different
properties of the same name for different types. Should be possible,
although we have to be careful to not break existing ones, and also
the API interface has to be separate for each type then (cannot really
have confiflicting api parameter schemas for the same name?)

We could also go in a completely different direction and create a config
per profile? (like we handle vm configs). Downside of that is, that the
current guest config handling part is partly in pmxcfs, so we'd have to
make that either more generic, or duplicate it for profiles.
(I don't quite like this one, since i think a single config for all
profiles should be enough?  We could still do that later if we want
and the current way is impractical)

The minor issues:

* Is the priv path ok? /mapping/profiles/<id> feels a bit weird
* We should probably introduce a 'meta' property for ct like we have for
  vms? we could record the profile there and also e.g. the template used
  to set the container up.
* I did not restrict to any options of the config and i don't believe
  this should make any issues (the critical ones are filtered out anyway)
  but should we maybe have some kind of whitelist? if yes, which one
  should be on there?
* there is still an issue with the docs generation, i'll have to look
  into it
* I'm not quite sure how the UI for creating/editing profiles should
  look like. For creating i could imagine a 'create profile from guest'
  type of thing (thanks @mira for the idea), but for editing or creating
  from scratch I'm a bit conflicted. We could simply show the profiles
  in the tree, and reuse the vm hw/options panels for that, but does
  that seem overkill? We could also leave that API only for now, and
  make the gui later? (Using it in the wizard would also not be trivial,
  but there the constraints are rather straight forward)

pve-cluster:

Dominik Csapak (1):
  add profiles.cfg to cluster fs

 src/PVE/Cluster.pm  | 1 +
 src/pmxcfs/status.c | 1 +
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)

pve-guest-common:

Dominik Csapak (1):
  add profiles section config plugin

 src/Makefile               |  2 ++
 src/PVE/Profiles/Plugin.pm | 72 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 74 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 src/PVE/Profiles/Plugin.pm

qemu-server:

Dominik Csapak (4):
  meta info: allow additional properties to be given
  add the VM profiles plugin
  api: add profile option to create vm api call
  qm: register and init the profiles plugins

 PVE/API2/Qemu.pm      | 27 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 PVE/CLI/qm.pm         |  6 ++++++
 PVE/Makefile          |  1 +
 PVE/Profiles/Makefile |  5 +++++
 PVE/Profiles/VM.pm    | 37 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 PVE/QemuServer.pm     | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++--------
 6 files changed, 96 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 PVE/Profiles/Makefile
 create mode 100644 PVE/Profiles/VM.pm

pve-container:

Dominik Csapak (3):
  add the CT profiles plugin
  api: add profile option to create ct api call
  pct: register and init the profiles plugins

 src/PVE/API2/LXC.pm       | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
 src/PVE/CLI/pct.pm        |  6 ++++++
 src/PVE/Makefile          |  1 +
 src/PVE/Profiles/CT.pm    | 37 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 src/PVE/Profiles/Makefile |  4 ++++
 5 files changed, 72 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 src/PVE/Profiles/CT.pm
 create mode 100644 src/PVE/Profiles/Makefile

pve-manager:

Dominik Csapak (1):
  api: add guest profile api endpoint

 PVE/API2/Cluster.pm          |   6 +
 PVE/API2/Cluster/Makefile    |   1 +
 PVE/API2/Cluster/Profiles.pm | 230 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 3 files changed, 237 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 PVE/API2/Cluster/Profiles.pm

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2.30.2