Currently, nbdkit support will automatically be enabled as long as
the pidfd_open(2) syscall is available. Optionally, libnbd is used
to generate more user-friendly error messages.
In theory this is all good, since use of nbdkit is supposed to be
transparent to the user. In practice, however, there is a problem:
if support for it is enabled at build time and the necessary
runtime components are installed, nbdkit will always be preferred,
with no way for the user to opt out.
This will arguably be fine in the long run, but right now none of
the platforms that we target ships with a SELinux policy that
allows libvirt to launch nbdkit, and the AppArmor policy that we
maintain ourselves hasn't been updated either.
So, in practice, as of today having nbdkit installed on the host
makes network disks completely unusable unless you're willing to
compromise the overall security of the system by disabling
SELinux/AppArmor.
In order to make the transition smoother, provide a convenient
way for users and distro packagers to disable nbdkit support at
compile time until SELinux and AppArmor are ready.
In the process, detection is completely overhauled. libnbd is
made mandatory when nbdkit support is enabled, since availability
across operating systems is comparable and offering users the
option to make error messages worse doesn't make a lot of sense;
we also make sure that an explicit request from the user to
enable/disable nbdkit support is either complied with, or results
in a build failure when that's not possible. Last but not least,
we avoid linking against libnbd when nbdkit support is disabled.
At the RPM level, we disable the feature when building against
anything older than Fedora 40, which still doesn't have the
necessary SELinux bits but will hopefully gain them by the time
it's released. We also allow nbdkit support to be disabled at
build time the same way as other optional features, that is, by
passing "--define '_without_nbdkit 1'" to rpmbuild. Finally, if
nbdkit support has been disabled, installing libvirt will no
longer drag it in as a (weak) dependency.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Jonathon Jongsma <jjongsma@redhat.com>