Re: [Qemu-devel] patch: allow defining MAC address etc

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

On Sunday 21 August 2005 01:36, jamal wrote:
> This attached patch is intended for allowing automated clever scripting
> for networking (tuntap only). Please read and apply if possible.
>
> It does the following:
> a) allow for specifying the guest netdevice interface MAC address
> (in addition to keeping the old functionality of specifying just
> the first one and letting qemu decide what subsequent ones should be)
> So now you can say something along the lines of:
> "-nics 2 -macaddr0 00:11:a:0:2:19 -macaddr1 00:11:a:0:1:19"
> We allow upto 6 such MAC addresses to be specified. Maybe theres
> a more clever way to achieve this.

Maybe a comma separated list of MAC addresses. e.g.
"-nics 2 macaddr 00:11:a:0:2:19,00:11:a:0:1:19"

Whatever you do, you should really support up to MAX_NICS addresses.

> b) allows to specify an opaque integer to be passed to the host script.
> Such an integer is useful if you are creating many NICs and you want
> to do different things depending on what this extra parameter is;
> example you may wanna add/del a route for one but not other
> syntax is of the form: "-ID1 1 -ID2 2"
> The IDs are mapped to the NICs. i.e ID1 maps to the first NIC
> and ID2 to the second etc. If you dont specify an ID, a 0 is used.
> Just like NICS/MACs we allow upto 6 such IDs to be specified.

Wouldn't it make more sense to just pass the mac address and/or the NIC 
number? Introducing yet another value seems unnecessarily complicated.

Paul