Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/16] Add a -netdev option

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 15:44 +0000, Paul Brook wrote:
> On Thursday 08 October 2009, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Hi,
> >         Here's a series of patches which gets the ball rolling on adding
> > a -netdev option.
> >...
> >         The idea is to de-emphasise the vlan support, and instead make
> > a nic directly connected to a host backend the default and recommended
> > configuration. We want this because it is only with this configuration
> > that we feasibly add optimizations like GSO support or vhost-net.
> 
> If we're going to introduce point-point connections then IMO everything should 
> be a point-point connection. Having separate point-point and multiple-peer 
> cases is just going to come back and bite us later.
> 
> Once you have a symmetric point-point API, negotiation of features (such as 
> offload, filtering, etc) should be relatively straightforward.  Device 
> creation and port connection should be separate events, with feature 
> negotiation occurring at connection. This gives you hotplug for free, and 
> avoids ordering issues.  vlan functionality is implemented via a fairly 
> trivial hub device that has many ports and doesn't implement any of the fancy 
> optional features.

Yep, that's roughly the plan.

Cheers,
Mark.