Re: [Qemu-devel] bidirectional data exchange between guest and host without network

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 11:38:32PM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > There is no IPv4 address you can give to the new interface which won't
> > have the potential to conflict with some other IPv4 address already in
> > use.  Extra network devices require special handling in firewall rules
> > and changes to the configuration of every network daemon in the
> > system.
> 
> A network interface with no IPv4 or IPv6 addresses assigned would
> avoid most daemon problems.  Using a non-ethernet MAC type and
> point-to-point would probably avoid the rest, even routing daemons,
> NetworkManager and the like.  Use raw sockets over the interfaces.

Can you give a precise description of how to configure this with qemu?

> > While it's possible to configure the guest specially to avoid this,
> > that doesn't look much like our promise to run any vanilla guest as a
> > virtual machine.
> 
> I don't see how "any vanilla guest" can use vmchannel, since it
> requires specific kernel support doesn't it, and therefore the guest
> tools can only use vmchannel on new guest kernels built for it?

Point taken, but a vanilla guest + a support package, as with
VMWare Tools or Linux fullvirt + virtio drivers.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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