[Qemu-devel] Documentation

[Donald Allen]

I've just this week begun using qemu (actually qemu-kvm) on a 64-bit Slackware (13.37) system. You people have produced a very useful piece of software, very nice work. But I must say that the documentation does not do the software justice. I have just spent a maddening several hours trying to get simple smb access to files on the host machine working. The documentation on networking is scattered over multiple places, much of it is obsolete and/or incorrect, and it suffers from lack of examples. After several hours, I finally noticed the comment on the page

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Networking

that says that
qemu -m 256 -hda winxp.img -kernel-kqemu &
qemu -m 256 -hda winxp.img -kernel-kqemu -net nic -net user &

are equivalent. Aha! -net nic and -net user are *not* mutually exclusive, as the qemu man page implies. And the smb option only works with -net user. But if you specify *only* -net user, you don't get a network interface in the guest. Where do you read about this key fact that *both* -net options are needed, as I

pieced together after hours of detective work?

If you care about people using this thing, then I suggest to you that you think about the common cases (and I submit that just wanting to access the network at large plus files on the host machine is a common case) and concentrate the documentation effort on those.

And *please* give examples.

Thanks again for your good work, but please improve the documentation.

/Don Allen