Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH v2 9/9] Add -kvm option

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> I think what you're arguing for is a truly bare bones machine type where
> there are no assumptions about having a first nic.
>
> But let's look at this from a much higher level. What is a user
> typically going to want to do? They're probably going to want to change
> the networking settings globally. They'll either want to always use tap
> and use the default network device or they're going to want to always
> have two nics because they have to physical devices with separate networks.
>
> A user would either create a new machine type to use for all of their
> machines, or they would modify a global host config to change from slirp
> to tap. It shouldn't be the common case that they are manually
> specifying -device command line options. -device is pretty obtuse and
> really is an expert option for things like libvirt and as a placeholder
> for a proper config.

Time to polish and post my config file patches for discussion ...

I expect we'll have *two* kinds of config files:

#1 describes a machine type, i.e. -M $machine with only the really 
essential hardware.  Users should not have to deal with this at all. 
Something like the dtc bits from pbrook.

#2 describes the configuration of a virtual machine, i.e. what 
additional devices are plugged in, virtual disks, network setup, ...

I have patches for #2 which essentially read/write QemuOpts to a 
git-style config file.

We could simply ship a type #2 default config file with nic, vga, serial 
etc.  Or two, with the second being the -nographic variant.

cheers,
  Gerd