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

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>]

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.

        Where we're going is that rather '-net user -net nic' being the
default, it would instead be:

  -netdev user,id=default_slirp -device e1000,netdev=default_slirp

        This patch series has a lot of this done, but there's still a
significant TODO list including:

  * qdev-ify the NICs so that we can use -device rather than '-net nic'
    which Gerd has started looking at

  * add hotplug equivalent to netdev - we should probably add a 'nic='
    argument to -netdev for this to allow changing the backend without
    changing the frontend

  * 'info network' should list netdevs

  * merging in GSO support from qemu-kvm.git, substantially cleaned up

  * VLAN support should be implemented as just another network client,
    but one which is connected to multiple backends and frontends

  * re-naming e.g. VLANClientState to NetClient

  * killing off NICInfo

  * ...

        I've given this series significant testing including building
with all targets (really!), mingw, --disable-slirp, --enable-vde,
without TUNSETSNDBUF and running with various nic models, backends,
with both -net and -netdev, some different guests, hotplug, ... No
doubt I've still managed to screw something up.

Cheers,
Mark.