On Sunday 20 February 2011, Gerhard Wiesinger wrote:
Not sure if this is by design or due to internals of the networking
stack, but it looks unintuitive from user perspective. Maybe Arnd can
shed a light on this.
The lower device cannot be in bridge mode, because that would make the
logic in the kernel awfully complex. I agree that it's a bit unfortunate,
but it simplified the design a lot.
Of course, you could also simply offload all that setup to libvirt.
http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking
But that still needs a bridge on ethernet level and break up the existing
interface, right?
No. macvtap is a tap that sits on an external interface, you don't
need a bridge if you use it.
BTW: From: http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/MacVTap
As of QEMU 0.12:
qemu -net nic,model=virtio,addr=1a:46:0b:ca:bc:7b -net tap,fd=3 3<>/dev/tap11
Is there a newer Syntax with tap interfaces possible (QEMU GIT) without
bash redirects?
I made some suggestions how to integrate it with qemu, but they never got in.
Libvirt makes it a lot easier, though. We discussed that it should be cleaned
up when the networking helper scripts make it into qemu. Not sure if that
ever happened.