Hello,
I have an idea for cockpit, but before thinking it further, I'm
interested in hearing your opinions. I am oVirt developer mostly
dealing with system stuff and this is something that could be useful
in virtualization while also providing utility for administrators
using cockpit.
The idea is about new tab/plugin (not sure of the terminology) called
'devices', that would allow access to (hardware) devices as exposed by
sysfs. The interface could be similar to 'Services' tab/plugin,
showing a list of device names created from their physical location,
similarly to libvirt's nodedev-list.
After clicking on the name, new screen would be presented, showing
additional information such as
* physical address,
* driver in use,
* special capabilities (SR-IOV numvfs and totalvfs, NPIV max_vports,
vports),
* iommu group (possibly clickable to reveal all devices in given
group),
* vendor, vendor id, product, product id.
Additionally, it makes sense to allow some basic operations:
* unbinding from host driver, binding it to specific one (useful for
local vfio-pci testing),
* reattaching it back (one use case is that
oVirt does not reattach devices automatically due to possible
issues, needs user intervention),
* setting numvfs, vports,
* ... ?
Do you find ideas above reasonable for cockpit? It is mostly in idea
phase, and builds on development and requirements of oVirt. I
personally believe that this could be useful for broader audience.
Thanks,
mpolednik