Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] mark nic as trusted

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 01:14:33AM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >  
> >>Are we going to have a standard way of doing this in Linux distros such 
> >>that these nics are treated differently from other nics?  Have we gotten 
> >>the appropriate distro folks to agree to this?
> >>    
> >
> >That wouldn't work for older distros and Windows anyway.  But you
> >might reasonably want to run apps doing guest-host communication on
> >older guest distros too, simply as an app, not requiring guest
> >customisation.
> >  
> We can make fedora, rhel and libvirt support it. It might be a bit 
> painful but since
> a network device was chosen for this propose then that's the right way 
> to go.

For new Fedora / RHEL yes, but a large number of people using virt are
doing so with old OS versions, and the chances of anyone retro-fitting
all old distros is near zero. You might get it done if they were back
porting the VirtIO NIC devices to old distros, but almost certainly not
for arbitrary NIC devices like rtl8139/e1000/etc because its a huge
QA testing headache to avoid regressions.

Daniel
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