[Libguestfs] supermin appliances and host connectivity

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 10:28:04PM +0200, Joel Uckelman wrote:
> What I'm having trouble with, and the reason I'm writing you, is that
> it's not clear to me how much needs to be added to a supermin
> appliance built following your instructions to either (1) enable
> networking, or (2) create a bidirectional pipe with the host. (Really
> all we need is a pipe, networking is actually overkill.)
> 
> Is this making sense? Is there a straightforward way to do this?

Yes, that's what we do in libguestfs.  In fact both things: we create
a bi-directional pipe, and we optionally enable full IP networking.  I
suggest TBH you just look at the code, as that's simpler than me
explaining it:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=src/launch.c;h=0b15ce98d79fac55032a7e93788f62d0011e8c34;hb=HEAD#l392

The key words are "virtio serial" and "user networking".

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v