Vendor Methods

This document is a quick tutorial on writing vendor specific methods to a driver.

The first thing to note is that the Ironic API supports two vendor endpoints: A driver vendor passthru and a node vendor passthru.

• The driver vendor passthru allows drivers to expose a custom top-level functionality which is not specific to a Node. For example, let’s say the driver pxe_ipmitool exposed a method called authentication_types that would return what are the authentication types supported. It could be accessed via the Ironic API like:

GET http://<address>:<port>/v1/drivers/pxe_ipmitool/vendor_passthru/authentication_types

• The node vendor passthru allows drivers to expose custom functionality on per-node basis. For example the same driver pxe_ipmitool exposing a method called send_raw that would send raw bytes to the BMC, the method also receives a parameter called raw_bytes which the value would be the bytes to be sent. It could be accessed via the Ironic API like:

POST {'raw_bytes': '0x01 0x02'} http://<address>:<port>/v1/nodes/<node UUID>/vendor_passthru/send_raw

Writing Vendor Methods

Writing a custom vendor method in Ironic should be simple. The first thing to do is write a class inheriting from the VendorInterface class:

class ExampleVendor(VendorInterface)

    def get_properties(self):
        return {}

    def validate(self, task, **kwargs):
        pass

The get_properties is a method that all driver interfaces have, it should return a dictionary of <property>:<description> telling in the description whether that property is required or optional so the node can be manageable by that driver. For example, a required property for a ipmi driver would be ipmi_address which is the IP address or hostname of the node. We are returning an empty dictionary in our example to make it simpler.

The validate method is responsible for validating the parameters passed to the vendor methods. Ironic will not introspect into what is passed to the drivers, it’s up to the developers writing the vendor method to validate that data.

Let’s extend the ExampleVendor class to support two methods, the authentication_types which will be exposed on the driver vendor passthru endpoint; And the send_raw method that will be exposed on the node vendor passthru endpoint:

class ExampleVendor(VendorInterface)

    def get_properties(self):
        return {}

    def validate(self, task, method, **kwargs):
        if method == 'send_raw':
            if 'raw_bytes' not in kwargs:
                raise MissingParameterValue()

    @base.driver_passthru(['GET'], async=False)
    def authentication_types(self, context, **kwargs):
        return {"types": ["NONE", "MD5", "MD2"]}

    @base.passthru(['POST'])
    def send_raw(self, task, **kwargs):
        raw_bytes = kwargs.get('raw_bytes')
        ...

That’s it!

Writing a node or driver vendor passthru method is pretty much the same, the only difference is how you decorate the methods and the first parameter of the method (ignoring self). A method decorated with the @passthru decorator should expect a Task object as first parameter and a method decorated with the @driver_passthru decorator should expect a Context object as first parameter.

Both decorators accept these parameters:

• http_methods: A list of what the HTTP methods supported by that vendor function. To know what HTTP method that function was invoked with, a http_method parameter will be present in the kwargs. Supported HTTP methods are POST, PUT, GET and PATCH.
• method: By default the method name is the name of the python function, if you want to use a different name this parameter is where this name can be set. For example:

@passthru(['PUT'], method="alternative_name")
def name(self, task, **kwargs):
    ...

• description: A string containing a nice description about what that method is supposed to do. Defaults to “” (empty string).

• async: A boolean value to determine whether this method should run asynchronously or synchronously. Defaults to True (Asynchronously).

The node vendor passthru decorator (@passthru) also accepts the following parameter:

• require_exclusive_lock: A boolean value determining whether this method should require an exclusive lock on a node between validate() and the beginning of method execution. For synchronous methods, the lock on the node would also be kept for the duration of method execution. Defaults to True.

Warning

Please avoid having a synchronous method for slow/long-running operations or if the method does talk to a BMC; BMCs are flaky and very easy to break.

Warning

Each asynchronous request consumes a worker thread in the ironic-conductor process. This can lead to starvation of the thread pool, resulting in a denial of service.

Backwards Compatibility

There is no requirement that changes to a vendor method be backwards compatible. However, for your users’ sakes, we highly recommend that you do so.

If you are changing the exceptions being raised, you might want to ensure that the same HTTP code is being returned to the user.

For non-backwards compatibility, please make sure you add a release note that indicates this.