Features/NetworkManagerBridging

= Feature Name = NetworkManager bridging support

Summary
NetworkManager should support setting up and controlling bridge devices and bonded connections

Owner

 * Name: Dan Williams
 * Email: dcbw@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 13
 * Last updated: 2009-12-09
 * Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description
Bridging is about connecting 2 or more network devices to make network traffic automatically go from the one to the other. The network devices can be physical or virtual.

Bridging is a commonly used technology to connect VMs to the outside world: create a tap device on the host, create a bridge between the physical nic and the tap, let the vm use the tap device as its nic. So far, this setup is handled by libvirt. This is the main driving use case for this feature.

Bonding is about glueing two network connections together and treat them as a single connection with bigger bandwidth. This happens at the ethernet level and thus only works if the two connections are to the same network. Bonding has uses mainly on servers, and is more of a byproduct in this feature, since the infrastructure for bridging will likely also support bonding.

Benefit to Fedora
NetworkManager becomes a more central point for network configuration, giving a more unified user experience. Virtualization on Fedora will be easier to set up.

Scope
This feature requires changes to NetworkManager and nm-applet.

How To Test
TBD

User Experience
TBD

Dependencies
libvirt may need to be adapted. See also Features/Shared_Network_Interface.

Contingency Plan
Don't support bridging in NetworkManager, virtualization will continue to rely on libvirt for this purpose.

Documentation
TBD

Release Notes
TBD

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/YourFeatureName