Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu + wireless

[S . P . T . Krishnan]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your insightful reply.
Allow me to re-phrase my question.  Hope you can comment further.

Basically, we have a need to run a application that needs a wifi
interface in a virtual machine.  You can think of the application as
this command "iwlist eth1 scan".  What this does is that it scans the
airspace and lists all the networks(essid) it detects.  Now if I want
to run this command in a VM, the VM should see a wifi interface.
This is my query.  The virtual wifi interface must support the
upward/downward movement of layer2 wifi frames.

Can we have a wifi interface in a VM that can support queries like the above ?
There is a physical wifi device at the host.  I am thinking that just
as Qemu links the virtual device to the actual nic card in the host,
can it links the virtual wifi device to the actual wifi device ?
(assuming the new functionaly is developed)

regards,
Krishnan

On 8/4/06, Ben Taylor <address@hidden> wrote:
> ---- "S.P.T.Krishnan" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > This is my first post to this list.
>
> Welcome.
>
> > I have been using qemu for the last several versions.  Works great, in
> > fact I just booted off a Vista beta 2 yesterday from a linux host.
> >
> > My query is whether Qemu either now or in the near future will support
> > wireless interface ?
>
> In what sense?  I have used qemu with -net user with my hosts' wifi interface.
> However, due to the nature of how wifi works, I think it would be impossible
> to setup a bridge (like you can do with a wired lan) and use the tap interface
> to provide full access to a qemu guest.  One reason is one-to-one mapping 
> between
> a wifi interface and it's AP.
>
> > Example: Qemu_VM could be configured to use wireless (in a different
> > subnet) while the host be on wired interface.
>
> I suspect that using a tap interface, and some ipfilt rules, you might be able
> to make this work.  Assuming that the host doesn't have anything to do with
> that interface, you could write the ipfilt rules to push all the packets to the
> tap interface with a rewrite rule.  However, I can't give you much help beyond
> that.  I don't do ipfilt these days.
>
> HTH
>
> Ben
> >
> > regards,
> > Krishnan
> >
> >
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