Cinder Conf is bloated with duplicate options for drivers

[John Griffith]

Now that Cinder has well over 20 drivers that can be configured we have a pretty lengthy config file. There's a lot of duplicate entries, for example rather than using a single "enable_chap" option and allowing it to be set in a drivers config section, most drivers want to be snow-flakes and do "<vendor-name>_enable_chap". Seems kinda silly.

There are other places we have this problem as well... back in the Nova days, we used san_ip, san_login and san_password for connecting to a device, whether it was a REST endpoint, SSH etc. Some drivers still just use those generic options, while others use things like "api_url" and "<vendor-driver>_username" and on and on.

Think it would be great if we made things more general and shared options.

[Jay Bryant (jsbryant)]

Once concern ... Maybe chap_enabled is a bad example, but what do we do for the cases where you have one backend that would want chap_enabled set but not for another backend?

[John Griffith (john-griffith)]

@jay
That's what multi-backend and the use of self.configuration does for us

So in your conf file you would have:

enabled_backends=abc, xyz

[abc]
enable_chap=True
.......

[xyz]
enable_chap=False
.......

As long as the driver uses config properly via self.configuration these will be independent. And for the case of NOT using multi-backend it's irrelevant and you just need the one single default entry.

[Jay Bryant (jsbryant)]

Ok, I was hoping that the answer was that multi-backend would properly handle that. Thanks for verifying.

[Rushi Agrawal (rushiagr)]

So what's the preferred way to remove the duplicated option? Should we mark them as deprecated for one cycle?

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/148091

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/148091
Committed: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/cinder/commit/?id=3ffb34e8e92d0aa7e23a470695627434455c9858
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit 3ffb34e8e92d0aa7e23a470695627434455c9858
Author: Rushi Agrawal <email address hidden>
Date: Sun Jan 18 12:23:32 2015 +0530

    EQLX: Consolidate CHAP config options

    In order to reduce configuration option bloat, it would be a good exercise
    to consolidate configuration options which many drivers implement under
    their own distinct name but have same functionality. Here, a first attempt
    is made to consolidate CHAP configuration options. Dell's EQLSanISCSIDriver
    is made to use these new set of configuration options 'use_chap_auth',
    'chap_username' and 'chap_password' instead of the driver-specific options
    'eqlx_use_chap', 'eqlx_chap_login' and 'eqlx_chap_password' respectively in
    this patch. More drivers are to be added in the future.

    DocImpact: Config options of Dell EQLSanISCSIDriver are changed

    Change-Id: I5c51301653ad0f76ce0550e12177ad08f20290e0
    Partial-Bug: 1398976

[Sean McGinnis (sean-mcginnis)]

Automatically unassigning due to inactivity.

[Sean McGinnis (sean-mcginnis)]

This is kind of an ongoing effort to make sure new drivers don't add new config options for common things. I think some (most?) of the original concern has been addressed. But I do think this is something we maybe do a little better job in reviews watching for these things.