[Qemu-devel] Alternative mac address setting

["Benoît Canet" <benoit.canet@irqsave.net>]

Hello,

I want to implement an alternative mac address setting to allow a guest using
virtio-net to change it's mac address by itself.

The main use case is high availability setups where a slave machine take the
lead when the master is failing. (heartbeat)

The thing that an alternate mac address setting would allow to do is to make
the switch _without_ requiring a gratuitous arp.

The slave guest would simply take the master guest mac address and resume
operations.

I initially though about implementing a list of alternate mac address but I fear
that in this context lists are frowed upon.

Do you have any advice on how to implement this feature ?

Should I support old net device declaration ?

What is the strict minimum changes that would need to be done to implement the
feature ?

Best regards

Benoît