Comment 28 for bug 1734320

(something we discussed with Armando yesterday)

if for some reason the suggested change to os-vif to mark all new ports with dead tag is breaking other projects, we may roll it in as opt-in, where consumer passes some flag through binding profile dictionary that would instruct nova to also mark a new port as dead; then the flag would be proxied into os-vif binding code that would enact the request. If the flag was not set / passed disabled, then nova would not request port death, and os-vif would do the same action as it does right now.

There are several compatibility issues to be concerned about here.

1. we effectively change api payload for binding extension; but because we already treat profile dict as a large box of random crap to pass around between neutron and nova, unpatched nova should already be ready to receive a dict with unknown keys.

2. it may be that os-vif is not patched while nova is, which would potentially lead to binding call to os-vif failing because of unknown flag passed by nova. I don't think we can bump minimal supported os-vif version in requirements.txt, so nova will need to find a way to deal with older releases. If nothing else, we can always catch TypeError: ... expected at least X arguments, got Y error and fall back to flag-less call to os-vif (plus a warning).