Fedora, RHEL 8.x+ Packaging for OVN

This document provides instructions for installing OVN on Fedora, RHEL 8.x and later, and CentOS Stream, either from distribution packages or by building RPM packages from source. Instructions for installing OVN from source without packaging can be found in the OVN on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD.

Installing from Packages

Fedora provides ovn, ovn-central, ovn-host, ovn-vtep, and ovn-br-controller RPM packages. Use dnf to install them as superuser.

For a central node (runs OVN databases and ovn-northd):

$ sudo dnf install ovn-central

For each host/hypervisor (runs ovn-controller):

$ sudo dnf install ovn-host

Additional packages:

$ sudo dnf install ovn                 # shared components
$ sudo dnf install ovn-vtep            # VTEP gateway support
$ sudo dnf install ovn-br-controller   # bridge controller

For RHEL and CentOS Stream, the OVN packages may be available through EPEL or the distribution’s own repositories.

Note

The packaged version available in distributions may not be the latest OVN release.

Building RPM Packages from Source

Build Requirements

Install RPM tools and generic build dependencies:

$ sudo dnf install @'Development Tools' rpm-build dnf-plugins-core

Then install OVN-specific build dependencies. The dependencies are listed in the SPEC file, but first it is necessary to replace the VERSION tag to be a valid SPEC.

The command below will create a temporary SPEC file:

$ sed -e 's/@VERSION@/0.0.1/' rhel/ovn-fedora.spec.in \
  > /tmp/ovn.spec

And to install the specific dependencies:

$ sudo dnf builddep /tmp/ovn.spec

Once that is completed, remove the file /tmp/ovn.spec.

Bootstrapping

Refer to Bootstrapping.

Configuring

Refer to Configuring.

Building

To build OVN RPMs, first generate the OVS source tarball in the OVS source directory (the OVS submodule must be built first, as described in Bootstrapping):

$ make -C ovs dist

Then execute the following from the OVN source directory (in which ./configure was executed):

$ make rpm-fedora

This will create the RPMs ovn, ovn-central, ovn-host, ovn-vtep, ovn-docker, and ovn-br-controller, along with their debuginfo variants.

You can also have the above commands automatically run the OVN unit tests. This can take several minutes:

$ make rpm-fedora RPMBUILD_OPT="--with check"

Installing

RPM packages can be installed by using the command rpm -i. Package installation requires superuser privileges:

$ sudo rpm -i ovn-*.rpm

Or install specific packages:

$ sudo rpm -i ovn-<version>.rpm              # shared components
$ sudo rpm -i ovn-central-<version>.rpm      # on central node
$ sudo rpm -i ovn-host-<version>.rpm         # on each host

Reporting Bugs

Report problems to https://github.com/ovn-org/ovn/issues or discuss@openvswitch.org.