@erikh - we should fix this, but this change alone may not cut it unless Sanity Vagrant VM is also updated to pick up the updated go version. @aanm also tried out similiar change in another PR (still open). In fact few of us have run into this.
The reason to do this was to ensure that build speeds are faster. Comments @mapuri ?

Sounds good @mapuri, I'll close this.

Regarding my other question re: testing in docker -- is that something we can do or is a host VM necessary?

Additionally, it seems like I have to be able to build this on the host and the VM. I'm on a mac, so vishvananda/netlink doesn't build in the first step. Is there a way around this?

Sorry to ask questions here, I know this is probably not the best spot, but I have no better way to chat atm.

Netplugin itself could run as docker container. However the entire setup (one/two host) needs a VM because it expects an independent OVS instance on each node/host.

The best way to get it to work on a MAC is to spawn two VMs using Vagrant, launch netplugin and fire up json config. We need to update the docs with those instructions.

Would it make sense to test this under docker itself?

Yes, this came up recently in some other discussion as well. I think it might be doable but there are certain things that will need to be looked at and I haven't gotten a chance to explore.

Right now we use the vagrant vm(s) to provide a way to simulate multi-host environment (by deploying a vm per host). Each vm is just a ubuntu machine with etcd and ovs running. And in multi-host setups we connect the vms using virtualbox bridge for a bare bone Layer2 pass thru.

With a docker based sandbox, I think running etcd is certainly doable in the container but I am not very sure about running ovs though (as it depends on the kernel for datapath). ovs does provides a userspace datapath, but I am not very familiar with it, so that might need some investigation. For multi-host simulation, I think we should be able to use default docker bridge (the way we use virtual-box bridge)

Additionally, it seems like I have to be able to build this on the host and the VM. I'm on a mac, so vishvananda/netlink doesn't build in the first step. Is there a way around this?

I am not sure. @jainvipin would you know?

ah ok; making sense now. Sorry for the ignorance.

I'll see what I can do about automating things in a way that's more mac-friendly tonight. It'll get me more familiar with the code.

thanks @erikh - if anything can make it going easily for laptop users, would be a wonderful contribution.

Regarding netlink compilation - yes you'd have to compile this in a VM, natively on MAC is something I haven't tried out.