On 04.11.2009, at 01:28, Anthony Liguori wrote:
This series solves a problem that I've been struggling with for a
few years now.
One of the best things about qemu is that it's possible to run
guests as an
unprivileged user to improve security. However, if you want to have
your guests
communicate with the outside world, you're pretty much forced to run
qemu as
root.
At least with KVM support, this is probably the most common use case
which means
that most of our users are running qemu as root. That's terrible.
Yeah. Worse than the "run as root" part is the "it's hard" part
though. I hate how I feel when I try to explain someone how to use non-
slirp networking :-(.
The response to that is then usually "oh whatever, it's too
complicated anyways".
We address this problem by introducing a new network backend: -net
bridge. This
backend is less flexible than -net tap because it relies on a helper
with
elevated privileges to do the heavy lifting of allocating and
attaching a tap
device to a bridge. We use a special purpose helper because we
don't want
to elevate the privileges of more generic tools like brctl.
From a user perspective, to use bridged networking with a guest, you
simply use:
qemu -hda linux.img -net bridge -net nic
And assuming a bridge is defined named qemubr0 and the administrator
has setup
permissions accordingly, it will Just Work. My hope is that
distributions will
do this work as part of the qemu packaging process such that for
most users,
the out-of-the-box experience will also Just Work.
Yeah, that won't work as easily.
When your customer has 2 NICs this will already break. But let's
imagine we only have a single NIC.
So that NIC is a wifi card. When I set up the qemubr0 bridge for that
one now, how does network manager configure my wifi access? It can't
use the bridge device, as that doesn't have wifi extensions. It also
can't use the wifi device, because setting up networking on that will
break.
IMHO the only customer friendly choice I see is the ugly way. The way
VMware and Vbox do it.
To make it a bit less ugly, maybe we could create some way to "glue" a
tap device and an eth together, the same way the bridge code does,
just without the extra device.
Alex
