"-net" is a legacy option that often causes confusion and
misconfigurations for the users, since most people are not aware
of the underlying "vlan" (i.e. hub) concept that is used for this
parameter. The prefered way of configuring your network stack is
to use "--netdev" instead, which gives you a clean 1:1 connection
between your emulated guest hardware and the host network backend.
However, there are two reasons why we could not completely deprecate
"-net" yet:
1) Convenience:
In some cases, it's more convenient to use "-net" instead of "--netdev",
e.g. if you just want to have a "tap" network connection, it's faster
to type "-net nic -net tap" instead of "--device e1000,netdev=n1
--netdev tap,id=n1".
2) On-board NICs:
Currently the "-net nic" parameter is the only way to configure on-
board NICs on certain (embedded) machines via the nd_table[] array.
So beside some generic clean-ups and removal of code that has been
marked as deprecated since QEMU 2.10 already, this patch series intro-
duces a new parameter "--nic" (in patch 7) which should be able to re-
place "-net" in the long run completely: This new convenience parameter
can be used to configure the default/on-board guest HW together with a
host network backend in a very compact way. To configure a tap backend
for the default NIC, you just have to type "--nic tap" here for example.
Note that "-net" itself is not marked as deprecated yet - that is
subject to a later patch, since it likely needs some additional
discussion first (or we might rather want to wait for some more
releases first until --nic has been properly established instead)...
v3:
- Changed the comments in qapi/net.json in patch 5/7 according
to the suggestion from Eric. Dropped the Reviewed-bys from this
patch since the text changed a bit now.
- Dropped the final patch 8 with the updates to qemu-doc about
making -net less prominent. I'll resubmit that patch together
with a patch that deprecates "-net" in a separate patch series
instead (which will likely both need some more discussion first).
v2:
- Renamed "-n" to "--nic" (suggested by Paolo)
- Improved the QAPI comment about the removal of 'dump (suggested by Eric)
- exit(0) instead of exit(1) after showing the "-netdev help" (Eric)
- Improved the documenation for hubport a little bit (suggested by Paolo)
Thomas Huth (7):
net: Move error reporting from net_init_client/netdev to the calling
site
net: List available netdevs with "-netdev help"
net: Only show vhost-user in the help text if CONFIG_POSIX is defined
net: Make net_client_init() static
net: Remove the deprecated way of dumping network packets
net: Remove the deprecated 'host_net_add' and 'host_net_remove' HMP
commands
net: Add a new convenience option "--nic" to configure
default/on-board NICs
hmp-commands.hx | 30 ------
hmp.h | 3 -
include/net/net.h | 4 +-
include/sysemu/sysemu.h | 1 +
monitor.c | 61 ------------
net/dump.c | 102 +--------------------
net/net.c | 239 +++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------------
qapi/net.json | 29 ++----
qemu-doc.texi | 16 ----
qemu-options.hx | 48 +++++++---
tests/test-hmp.c | 2 -
vl.c | 10 +-
12 files changed, 170 insertions(+), 375 deletions(-)