[Maas-devel] 3rd Party Drivers

[Jeffrey Lane]

+1 on top posting ;-)

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Christian Robottom Reis
<kiko at canonical.com> wrote:
> PS. I hate top-posters.
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 01:49:46PM -0600, Jason Hobbs wrote:
>> Do we really want to expose this feature more as is?
>>
>> There's this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1382172 that says we
>> should move it to /var/lib/maas so people don't mess with it; documenting
>> it more publicly seems to conflict with that.
>
> I think there are two classes of user here that we should account for.
>
> The first is the user who installs MAAS and just expects it to work for
> them; that's probably the sort of user that Mark had in mind when he
> filed bug 1382172.
>
> The second is someone who uses MAAS and expects to extend it by
> providing their own "driver" functionality, be it third-party enablement
> drivers [for the kernel], or additional power control mechanisms. Jeff's
> request seems to fall in line with this scenario.
>
> Could we provide documentation, perhaps under
>
>     http://maas.ubuntu.com/docs1.5/#developing-maas
>
> that would accomplish the latter without making the system more brittle
> for the former?

I think this is fine.  I am actually looking at it from two perspectives:

1: Certification: How do we allow for adding 3rd party drivers?
Currently I have no clue how that process works, and thus no way to
answer the question.  Good example is Cisco and the SNIC driver that
Samantha asked about before, and it's a safe assumption that there
will be others (Mellanox? New storage systems? RAID drivers? etc)
going forward.  Rod summed the certification case up pretty well, it
is mostly a documentation question though I do get asked about the
process for getting 3rd party drivers recognized by MAAS from time to
time.

2:  I have little concrete data on this, BUT I get the feeling that
there's potential or interest for our partners to productize this.  A
good example of this is Quanta.  They expressed in selling an end-to
end, per-rack cloud solution that involves Landscape, MAAS, Juju,
local archive mirrors and enough hardware to do a full OpenStack
deployment and then sell add-on racks to scale out Compute and Storage
as needed.  For now, they use mostly off-the-shelf components from
what I've seen, but it's not a stretch to imagine that they may
include more bleeding edge hardware in the future.  I would also
imagine that such a thing could also be a solution sold by other
partners as well, but that's more a sales question and I'm not a sales
guy.  I just see a potential there.  Point there is, there's a good
chance that should that occur, we would likely need a defined process
that everyone is aware of for getting those drivers into MAAS.

FWIW, I do agree that we shouldn't have partners or customers hacking
scripts or config files in MAAS for this.  It should be as easy as
simply pointing maas at the repository or simplestream and saying "Yes
I want to enable this driver". OR better yet, we host that stream and
drivers (Is that how it's done now?)  I'm also sure there are plenty
of pitfalls there as well but I already know far more at this point
than I did this morning, so thanks for the pointers so far.

Additionally, I noticed that script says that it's only for d-i
installations.  Since we're dropping d-i, I presume that work is
underway to enable this for enlistment and commissioning and fast-path
install?

Hope that clarifies a bit about why I was asking.

Jeff


> --
> Christian Robottom Reis   | [+1] 612 888 4935    | http://launchpad.net/~kiko
> Canonical VP Hyperscale   | [+55 16] 9 9112 6430



-- 
Jeff Lane - Server Certification Team Lead, Tools Developer, Warrior
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