Re: [Qemu-devel] patch: allow defining MAC address etc

[jamal]

On Sun, 2005-21-08 at 02:04 +0100, Paul Brook wrote:
> On Sunday 21 August 2005 01:36, jamal wrote:
> > This attached patch is intended for allowing automated clever scripting
> > for networking (tuntap only). Please read and apply if possible.
> >
> > It does the following:
> > a) allow for specifying the guest netdevice interface MAC address
> > (in addition to keeping the old functionality of specifying just
> > the first one and letting qemu decide what subsequent ones should be)
> > So now you can say something along the lines of:
> > "-nics 2 -macaddr0 00:11:a:0:2:19 -macaddr1 00:11:a:0:1:19"
> > We allow upto 6 such MAC addresses to be specified. Maybe theres
> > a more clever way to achieve this.
> 
> Maybe a comma separated list of MAC addresses. e.g.
> "-nics 2 macaddr 00:11:a:0:2:19,00:11:a:0:1:19"
> 

i could do this; macaddr is already being used to imply the start
macaddr. Does macaddrs sound better?

> Whatever you do, you should really support up to MAX_NICS addresses.
> 

ok

> > b) allows to specify an opaque integer to be passed to the host script.
> > Such an integer is useful if you are creating many NICs and you want
> > to do different things depending on what this extra parameter is;
> > example you may wanna add/del a route for one but not other
> > syntax is of the form: "-ID1 1 -ID2 2"
> > The IDs are mapped to the NICs. i.e ID1 maps to the first NIC
> > and ID2 to the second etc. If you dont specify an ID, a 0 is used.
> > Just like NICS/MACs we allow upto 6 such IDs to be specified.
> 
> Wouldn't it make more sense to just pass the mac address and/or the NIC 
> number? Introducing yet another value seems unnecessarily complicated.
> 

The NIC number would not be sufficient for what i want; As an example,
I could use the ID to tell me the "type" of processing needed. 
Example test script:

---
if [ $2 = "0" ]; then
        #not really visible from host
        /usr/sbin/brctl addif base  $1
        /sbin/ifconfig $1 up
fi
if [ $2 = "1" ]; then
        .....
        ...
fi
if [ $2 = "2" ]; then
        #visible from host; give it an IP address
        /sbin/ifconfig $1 10.0.3.24 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
        /sbin/route add 10.0.3.25 dev $1
fi
---------

If i was to get rid of anything it probably would be the MAC address of
the guest since this is a host side setup. So i would like to keep the
ID but could let go of the guest MAC. Thoughts?


cheers,
jamal