On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 06:28:01PM -0600, 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. > > 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. > > More details are included in individual patches. I broke up the helper into > a series of patches to improve reviewabilty.
Would raw backend attached to a bridge mostly do the same? -- MST
