I don't know much about this patch which looks like internal qemu rearrangements so I guess fine. However I do have a few things to say about the ssh driver ...
As you know I wrote this a few years ago, and it uses libssh2. libssh2 has not evolved as quickly as we'd like and it may be better to use libssh instead -- despite the names, these are two separate and unrelated libraries. libssh supports a wider range of SSH encryption and has more features. It's generally more likely to work against a random SSH server. It has also been through the FIPS process. Indeed Red Hat made the decision to switch exclusively to libssh in RHEL 8, if that carries any weight. Pino posted a libssh2 -> libssh conversion patch a while back, but it has been somewhat stuck in review. If I recall the latest concern was whether it performs as well as the libssh2 version. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-06/msg07267.html In the meantime I added libssh support to nbdkit. nbdkit can be used as a complete replacement for qemu's ssh driver. nbdkit ssh host=foo.example.com disk.img -U tmpdirXXXXXX/sock qemu -hda nbd:unix:tmpdirXXXXXX/sock In fact it's somewhat superior (IMHO) because all of the tricky code handling libssh runs outside qemu in a separate process, improving isolation and potentially allowing separate, restrictive security policies to be applied. For example it would no longer be necessary to give qemu permission to connect to remote SSH servers. Could we make this really smooth somehow? nbdkit has a concept [https://www.mankier.com/1/nbdkit-captive] where we make it easy to manage external commands owned by nbdkit. Is there an equivalent feature of qemu where: qemu -object exec,id=nbd1,cmd='nbdkit -f -U $sock ssh ...' \ -drive file.driver=nbd,file.socket=nbd1 would run the command but also allocate a socket and kill the subcommand on exit (of qemu)? Basically I'm trying to think about how to make this a reality: https://rwmj.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/drawing2-svg.png Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
