Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/4] net-bridge: rootless bridge support for qemu

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Avi Kivity wrote:
>> Running qemu directly from the command line is absolutely an 
>> important use case. 
>
> Where does this requirement come from?

For most of qemu's lifetime, this was the only option.  The current 
graphical front ends only support a subset of qemu's features and qemu's 
target architecture types.  qemu is more than just KVM accelerated x86 
guests.

I also disagree that only developers are interested in using qemu 
directly.  There are a lot of power users who also use qemu directly.

>> A desktop user should not need things like libvirt and virt-manager.
>
> virt-mananger is miles ahead of where you're aiming.
>
> I'd like to a proper same-process graphical UI client.  But I don't 
> think this list is the place to create it.  I don't think we have 
> either the skills or the patience; also there's room for more than 
> one.  We should focus on making it easy to write one; that involves 
> exporting the display surface in an embeddable non-vnc way and making 
> everything controllable via QObjects (perhaps through the monitor, 
> perhaps through bindings for scripting languages.
>
>> If it cannot be fixed in the kernel, we'll have to work around it in 
>> userspace.  We can introduce our own spawn() function that works by 
>> fork()'ing very early and listening on a socketpair.  This will sit 
>> reading from the socket waiting for commands to exec.  Using a unix 
>> socket, we can pass fds that get inherited which we can't do with 
>> system().
>
> Or we can admit to ourselves that qemu is too complex to be directly 
> controlled by a user.  It's good to have an easy to use command line 
> for developers and power users; I'd welcome -net bridge as one of 
> them.  But we shouldn't try to invent access control systems or 
> install suid helpers.  Mainstream use needs to involve some management 
> agent which does authentication and privileged configuration (it was 
> already established that the the hotplug equivalent of -net bridge is 
> racy if any configuration is required).

I disagree about the role a management app should play.  For a casual 
user, a management app really should not be needed.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori