Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] net: Inform the user about deprecated -net options

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 16/12/2015 08:20, Thomas Huth wrote:
> Ah, ok, that makes more sense... anyway, "-device ?" also lists some
> devices like "ne2k_isa", ""usb-bt-dongle" and "vmxnet3" ... I somewhat
> doubt that we want to have these in the list of "-net nic" supported
> devices, too.

Why not?

> ... hmmm, by the way, why the heck do we have vmxnet3 on powerpc? Does
> that make sense at all?

By default all PCI devices are included in all targets, that's the
simple explanation. :)

>>>>>> The thing is, people are still running QEMU from the command line.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "-net nic -net bridge,br=virbr0" is still much less of a mouthful than
>>>>>> "-netdev bridge,br=virbr0,id=br -device rtl8139,netdev=br" if all I want
>>>>>> is something I can ssh into.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's easy to deprecate things.  It's hard to convince users that it's
>>>>>> worth, and you haven't convinced this user. :)
> 
> Just another idea before we drop this topic again completely: What if
> we'd extend "-netdev" to be easier to use, too. For example, if you'd
> just specify "-netdev bridge,br=virbr0", without using an id and without
> specifying a "-device", you would get the netdev hooked up to the
> board's default NIC automatically. That would be even less to type than
> your example with "-net" since you would not need the "-net nic"
> parameter in that case... Would it then be ok to deprecate the "-net"
> option?

Actually that would be the worst of both worlds. :)  The point of
-netdev is exactly to have no magic, to be a direct connection between
the command line and the devices.  It makes sense, it's just not too
user friendly.

I really think that if you move -net to net/netlegacy.c it wouldn't look
bad at all.

Paolo