[Qemu-devel] Alternative mac address setting

[Qemu-devel] Alternative mac address setting

[Benoît Canet]

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

Re: [Qemu-devel] Alternative mac address setting

[Benoît Canet]

Sorry for the gibberish I misread the code.
Please ignore this mail.

Best regards

Benoît

>Le Tuesday 16 Jul 2013 à 13:36:49 (+0200), Benoît Canet a écrit :
> 
> 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
>