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Revision a7c36ee4

IDa7c36ee4920ea3acc227a0248dd161693f207357

Added by Corey Bryant about 12 years ago

Add support for net bridge

The most common use of -net tap is to connect a tap device to a bridge. This
requires the use of a script and running qemu as root in order to allocate a
tap device to pass to the script.

This model is great for portability and flexibility but it's incredibly
difficult to eliminate the need to run qemu as root. The only really viable
mechanism is to use tunctl to create a tap device, attach it to a bridge as
root, and then hand that tap device to qemu. The problem with this mechanism
is that it requires administrator intervention whenever a user wants to create
a guest.

By essentially writing a helper that implements the most common qemu-ifup
script that can be safely given cap_net_admin, we can dramatically simplify
things for non-privileged users. We still support existing -net tap options
as a mechanism for advanced users and backwards compatibility.

Currently, this is very Linux centric but there's really no reason why it
couldn't be extended for other Unixes.

A typical invocation would be similar to one of the following:

qemu linux.img -net bridge -net nic,model=virtio
qemu linux.img -net tap,helper="/usr/local/libexec/qemu-bridge-helper" 
                 -net nic,model=virtio
qemu linux.img -netdev bridge,id=hn0
                 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1
qemu linux.img -netdev tap,helper="/usr/local/libexec/qemu-bridge-helper",id=hn0
                 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1

The default bridge that we attach to is br0. The thinking is that a distro
could preconfigure such an interface to allow out-of-the-box bridged networking.

Alternatively, if a user wants to use a different bridge, a typical invocation
would be simliar to one of the following:

qemu linux.img -net bridge,br=qemubr0 -net nic,model=virtio
qemu linux.img -net tap,helper="/usr/local/libexec/qemu-bridge-helper --br=qemubr0" 
                 -net nic,model=virtio
qemu linux.img -netdev bridge,br=qemubr0,id=hn0
                 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1
qemu linux.img -netdev tap,helper="/usr/local/libexec/qemu-bridge-helper --br=qemubr0",id=hn0
                 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hn0,id=nic1

Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <>
Signed-off-by: Richa Marwaha <>
Signed-off-by: Corey Bryant <>
Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <>

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