Re: nm-openvswitch on debian/ubuntu

[Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com>]

On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 18:39 +0200, Sohaib E. via networkmanager-list
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to use Network Manager to deploy ovs bridges on
> debian/ubuntu. 
>
> I understand that Network Manager itself do not have such a feature
> and needs an additional plugin called nm-openvswitch. Nevertheless,
> this plugin is not available on debian/ubuntu and, therefore, I was
> wondering if there was any workaround to deploy ovs bridges using
> nmcli on ubuntu/debian or to install nm-openvswitch on ubuntu/debian.

nm-openvswitch is part of NetworkManager, but

- it can be disabled/enabled at compile time

- it is loaded from a shared library (dlopen), so it can be packaged
separately (as done on Fedora, with NetworkManager-openvswitch
package). But it doesn't have to be packaged separately, Debian tends
to put all these device plugins in the same "network-manager" package,
while Fedora tends to split them (NetworkManager-{wifi,team,wwan,...}).


Debian builds with this code disabled. You would either have to
convince the debian maintainers to package this, or build
NetworkManager yourself. In the latter case, you could just rebuild the
debian package with minor changes to the build settings.


best,
Thomas