Re: [Qemu-devel] Is network backend netmap worth keeping?

[Markus Armbruster]

Giuseppe Lettieri <address@hidden> writes:

> Dear Markus,
>
> the netmap project is alive and well, if a bit understuffed. We have
> moved to github:
>
> https://github.com/luigirizzo/netmap
>
> We have users from FreeBSD, where it is part of the official kernel,
> and Linux, both from Academia and industry.
>
> But you asked about the netmap backend in QEMU, in particular. When it
> was merged, the decision was made to disable it by default because it
> was not supported upstream in Linux. As Jason Wang says, this support
> is even more unlikely now than it was then.
>
> The fact the the backend has to be explicitly enabled and built from
> the sources has obviously cut down the number of potential
> users. However, we still think it is useful and we have pending
> updates for it. If it's causing problems in the workflow, I am willing
> to help as much as I can.

Could we make it a submodule, simililar to slirp and capstone?

    --enable-netmap=system      use the system's netmap
    --enable-netmap=git         use the git submodule
    --enable-netmap             use system's, else git, else fail
    --disable-netmap            disable netmap
    default                     use system's, else git, else disable

A fresh clone of https://github.com/luigirizzo/netmap clocks in at
14MiB, which is between libslirp's 1.5MiB and capstone's 72MiB.