No more non-root networking modes?

No more non-root networking modes?

[Glenn Washburn]

Hi all,

I'm just now noticing that earlier this year obsolete networking
transports were removed (commit 65eaac591b75). This included SLiRP,
which was to my knowledge the only transport that supported network
access as an unprivileged user (no privileged access needed to setup
the transport either). Am I wrong about that? If not, I'm curious as to
why functionality that could not be achieved by other means was
dropped? And if there are any work arounds? I can understand why other
transports that need privileged access to setup, but were inferior to
other existing transports would be removed. I write this as someone who
is currently using the SLiRP transport.

Glenn

Re: No more non-root networking modes?

[Tiwei Bie]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:31:31 -0600, Glenn Washburn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm just now noticing that earlier this year obsolete networking
> transports were removed (commit 65eaac591b75). This included SLiRP,
> which was to my knowledge the only transport that supported network
> access as an unprivileged user (no privileged access needed to setup
> the transport either). Am I wrong about that? If not, I'm curious as to
> why functionality that could not be achieved by other means was
> dropped? And if there are any work arounds? I can understand why other
> transports that need privileged access to setup, but were inferior to
> other existing transports would be removed. I write this as someone who
> is currently using the SLiRP transport.

vec also supports networking without privileged access:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.17/virt/uml/user_mode_linux_howto_v2.html#vde-vector-transport
https://lore.kernel.org/all/bfa07f4d-16a3-476b-9314-b8052ec198b1@antgroup.com/

Regards,
Tiwei