Re: [Qemu-devel] Merging improvements from VirtualBox OSE into qemu?

[Alexey Eremenko]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Liraz Siri <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to the list so let me introduce myself. I am one of the
> developers for TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project that develops a
> family of lightweight installable live CDs optimized for various
> server-type tasks including LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Joomla, Drupal,
> MediaWiki, and others: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
>
> This type of pre-integrated, ready-to-use system is typically called a
> software appliance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_appliance
>
> We use qemu heavily in our development/testing. We find it's better
> suited as a scriptable primitive than other opensource alternative such
> as VirtualBox. Thankfully the KVM fork has gotten rid of the performance
> disadvantage qemu used to suffer from.
>
> Anyhow, I've recently explored the latest release of VirtualBox (which I
> understand is based on qemu).
>
> Two major changes in version 2.1 caught my attention:
>
> 1) complex setup is no longer required for "bridged" networking:
>
>   This is a big win for us as the former networking setup complexity
>   indirectly made TurnKey appliances much more difficult for regular
>   users to set up.
>
>   VirtualBox came to its senses and realized the tap configuration mess
>   was way too complex for most users and cumbersome even for advanced
>   users. Also, I don't think it worked with wireless NICs.
>
>   In the latest release, "host interface networking" just works. The
>   user simply selects which NIC to connect the guest to (e.g., eth0)
>   and they're done.
>
>   Behinds the scenes VirtualBox is putting your NIC into promisc mode to
>   sniff packets to guests and injecting packets directly to the NIC.
>   Essentially it creates a virtual NIC in software.
>
>   This works without root privileges somehow, probably by taking
>   advantage of new infrastructure in the VirtualBox device driver.

Yes, the new networking option makes life easier - and it works
without root if you are part of "vboxusers" group on your PC.
This feature is unlikely to be copied, because it is part of the
"vboxdrv" driver + part of the GUI.

However, other features, such as improved ICMP support via NAT, may
eventually make it into Qemu/KVM.
-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"